Word+Power+Essay

=Essay: To What Extent is the World Built on Words? =

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 Even a world built on words had to have a beginning.

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 Living a life undefined by words would be inarticulate and vague. Emotions would be inexpressible, thoughts would be hazy, and intelligence would be impossible. The world we grew up on as children would never exist—without words, we would never get to know ourselves. Words provide rules that we fence ourselves in with—they create boundaries that we can push insistently against to flesh out our own every-day circles and patterns. Harsh violence and loving caresses both would have no names. Communication would be base and vulgar; made up entirely of gestures and facial expressions and perhaps a livelier conversation would be speckled with hisses and grunts.



 In a world where humans are so socially dependent, how could our society cope with such a sudden degradation? When words have allowed us such valuable development, where would we be without them?

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Conversely, however, words are useless if the fundamental emotion that they describe does not exist. The imagery is empty. Every adjective is futile. There is no more understanding than if there were no words in the first place. In the same way any connection works, associations we make with individual words—the situations we relate them to, smells and feelings we associate with them, the feelings they prick our senses with—are all rules we’ve created to make sense of sensations.



We string old words together in a new way in order to create order, to express confusion, and perhaps even to create new strings of emotions, which in turn we build upon again in a ceaseless cycle.





 Though a picture may have the ability to communicate a thousand words, what is the use if we cannot distinguish and describe?

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 It can be considered both a blessing and a curse that language has become so woven into our lives. More than any technology, we have come to depend on language, taking it for granted that we can speak to one another more than we take for granted clean drinking water. We are so used to opening our mouths and words coming out that we don’t even consider speaking one of our basic human needs, the same way we consider the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins. However, we cry out when we cannot be heard. Our need to understand and be understood, to articulate, describe, and label, is a selfish entanglement of words and worlds. They build themselves upon one another, intertwined like the two sides of a tower converging to form one seamless peak.