WORDS

WORDS
One of the things that sets humans apart from other species is our ability to communicate with each other. Words, weather written or oral, are the vehicle we use to convey our thoughts. Words are little more than mental pictures that express our thoughts, emotions, and desires. I’ve always been interested in language and communication. Etymology is the study of the history of words.
When I say the word car, your mind quickly (or not so quickly) associates it with your mental image of a car. If I choose my words incorrectly, or don’t use enough detail, sometimes my mental image and your mental image are different. However if I say a Brand new red metallic 2008 Chevy Corvette Convertible, we are more likely to picture the same mental image (except in my mental image ..I am driving with the top down, sunglasses on, hundred dollar bills in my shirt pocket and the radio blast’in)
I’m not quite sure how words as we know them developed. It is said that Shakespeare coined over 1600 new words (a true wordsmith) Certainly the dictionary points to many origins from the early Greeks, but what about before that. At some point, somebody had to look at a rock and utter a sound they decide should be forever associated with it.(rock..from the cavemen “rauk”) and once that big hairy son of a gun called it that, he would kick your ass if you tried to call it anything else.
I kind’a wish I would have gotten in on that deal, I mean, you could never be wrong.(even though today I’m still making up new words ..not to mention spellings). It seems like most of the good words have already been taken. I’m not even sure you could even stutter back then. ( I mean, that would just be considered another word). I guess the whole lexicon was a lot simpler back then also.
Let’s face it they had no airplanes, skyscrapers, or Mcdonald’s to articulate about. If you had a basic command of the words: rock, club, food, and fire you were pretty much a linguistic genius. (oh..one other key phrase, useful for survival back then…… “Run..really big hungry dinosaur coming”
It also makes me wonder how certain words became curse words or 4 letter words. If I had to guess I would think they originated when the first caveman hit his finger with the first cave-club. Wow, that hurt like a *$$**@@@. Others say they were part of a prayer wishing ill on someone you hated and later reinforced by government censorship. They are still just words.(sticks and stones can break my bones but..words will never hurt me)
Of course, none of this addresses the fact that each country or continent seems to have evolved their own unique dialect or language. What made one group of people call it a rock, another a roca, and still another a roche, yet across the world its referred to as 岩石.(hope I used the translator right on that one)
Some estimates point to over 7,000 languages and dialects, that sometimes share common words. Linguists point to some words in several languages, they refer to as cognates, that descend from the same ancestral root word.
But it seems like we got a little lazy after a while and just started adding a prefix or suffix to common words to create new words or just extend the meaning of the base word. You know adding a few letters and getting scrabble 20 point words. Endings like –ism, ist, ite, logy. Now I take a 6 point word like terror and make it ..terrorism, social and make it socialist, or cardio and make it cardiology.
Words and language are an efficient communication tool. Depending on our skill with words, we can express simple, very complex, and even abstract ideas and concepts. Some of us use our words sparingly to express our thoughts and others are quite verbose. It is estimated that there are over 1 million words and their derivatives in the English language alone.
The average educated adult has a vocabulary of around 20,000 words, that leaves a lot of unspoken words. ( Note: although I’m normally quite loquacious ..it is said that I have a vocabulary of less than 6 words, before I have my first cup of coffee in the morning) It seems that education level and how much and individual reads are the two greatest determining factors in the level of an individuals vocabulary.
Well I could go on forever..but I like to think of myself man of few words…?
P.I.B.