Stuck between imaginary lines
Getting the right words makes all the difference. The more you look around what’s going on, the more you become convinced that we are far from mastering the art of using words — let’s not even discuss silence — once and for all. By some pathetic design, the right words elude us. We often end up pouring ourselves out into a stream of vocabularies far removed from what was meant to be said. It’s a verbal sham, to put it mildly.
For instance, what’s the difference between unpredictable and suspicious? Chances are you’d mentally classify these two words into the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ category. Profit is good. Greed is bad. Innuendo is good. Ribald is bad. Clever is good. Cunning is bad. Plump is good. Fat is bad. Accordingly, unpredictable is good whereas suspicious is bad. The former emits a favourably positive vibe while the latter stinks of negativity.
This approach sucks.
It could very well be a reason why we struggle with words and limited expression. We take immense pride in the distance we’ve traveled so far but we somehow fail to drop in the coin. It’s a weird curse, isn’t it? So many millennia of history, so many tribes, so many countries, so many cultures, so many languages, so many idioms and phrases, so many this and so many that. And yet none of us can claim to be the master of our tongues. Freudian slip? Freudian sink, more like.
Maybe, just maybe, we ought to expand our horizons beyond the set generalities. Maybe it’s time to dismiss the ‘goodness’ and the ‘badness’ of a given word. Because it’s pretty obvious that restricting our mind has become a reflection of the restriction on our vocabulary. We can do better than this. Or at least try to.
In this context, the association of words have to change. We mustn’t think of a reader when we hear the word voracious. Similarly, acclaimed shouldn’t be a patent for the artists. Why can’t a sportsperson or a soldier be acclaimed? The answer is pretty simple: We’ve gotten lazy with our vocabulary and, in effect, have arrested the boundless possibilities of communication. By which, if somebody asks you the difference between unpredictable and suspicious, you should let your brain race a bit. Let’s say, unpredictable is you wondering what number would come up while rolling the dice during a game of ludo. Whereas suspicious is you getting the number 6 five times in a row. No good-bad distinction here.
The world we’re living is wretched as well as tired. For what it’s worth, some of the blame can fall on the way we lead our lives. Doing the same thing again and again, saying the same thing again and again, expecting the same thing again and again… isn’t working. Being a social animal given to speciousness more than to originality has its drawbacks, after all. Not getting the right word most of the time is one of them.
