Words...

Words; don't come easy to me... if you guessed that this is the opening words to an old FR David song called Words, you are right. What is it about words? The use thereof mystifies me. Words put together in a logical order form sentences which in turn form paragraphs and so on and so forth. Humans communicate using words, either in the spoken or written form. Even though a picture can speak volumes, it is open to the interpretation of the viewer thus not expressing your thoughts or ideas but that of the viewer. To clearly and concisely express your thoughts or ideas it is then important to use words. But how does one use words to express your thoughts or feelings? I, for one, am at a loss for words at the best of times. The idea of putting them down on paper expressing my thoughts, feelings, desires; increases my loss for words exponentially.

Going back to my great love - music, "If a picture paints a thousand words then why can't I paint you..." Okay, no prizes for guessing the artist and title to this song. Bread sang this song called "If" and by now you should have guessed that words are the topic of my thoughts today. This song and the one sung by FR David aptly describe my situation. Using English as my language of choice to communicate, I find it extremely frustrating as I try to string words together into meaningful sentences and these sentences into thought provoking paragraphs. I get all flustered and irritated when I cannot express myself adequately using words. I liken my feeble attempts in putting my thoughts to "paper" to panelbeating words to fit.

Now granted, not everyone reading this suffers from foot in mouth as I do... but getting people to understand what I am trying to say or to get them to experience the emotion is what I am striving for. The difficulty is keeping it simple and move away from being verbose. The irony is that you end up sounding like a grade one pupil learning to read. Yet a sentence "Jip the cat" leads to a clearer understanding that Jip is a cat than "Jip is an animal belonging to the feline species."

We tend to use words, often inappropriately, to impress our peers or to show that we are educated. This understanding does not help me much though, as I get frustrated as I try to express myself through the written word. One day I will get it right. I wait patiently for that day.