Little Words

A little while ago, someone asked me to retract a comment I have made. I did what I was told, but behind my one-word compliance and the act of deleting that comment, was a torrent of daggers. Of pejoratives, of expletives. Like a cartoonish scene where it is calm and warm by the fireplace, but by the window the droplets incessantly knock the glass like bullets from a submachine gun. Up to this moment I still wonder why I am so bitter -- understatement -- about the little incident; after all it was just one sentence, one line. A dim, flickering light in the midst of high-flux spotlights, making no difference in or out of existence.

If I want to be brief about it though, perhaps the reason goes something like this: As someone who aspires to use words to make a living, I produce every line with careful consideration, and this one was no exception. Wordsmiths take pride in their creations, and when those flickering children die, the wordsmith die a little. The issue was what I said can be interpreted as libellous, somewhat. But exactly that was what I took pride in in that statement -- it can be interpreted as praise or scorn. For those in the know, the interpretation can mean that the person in consideration is lenient, lenient to a fault perhaps, but nothing scornful. For those not in the know, this nuance would be absent. Thus I was playing the classical ambiguous statement -- crusing along the fence -- here. It explains the situation quite nicely with a veiled nuance, without giving too much away. "Witty enough," said the self-editor in me.

Let me digress. Words and mouth are quite intertwined. The mouth, being the producer of the spoken language, is subject to a lot of metaphors. Needless to say, they are related to speaking and eating. But: speaking produces, eating consumes; isn't that antonymic? But there is an excellent example which manages to unite the above ostensible opposites:

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"
-- Matthew 4:4

And how interesting indeed that the one who spoke of these things is also known as the Word, or Logos in the original Greek. The mouth is then a point of reconciliation. Words are bread. Words nourish us. Indeed these are true for the words from the Scripture. But we bear semblances to the Word, after all we are in his image. Thus the words we produce indeed nourish sometimes, though at most other times they destroy.

In this way our words are powerful, our tongues are tongues of fire dancing a dance of destruction. And I'm reminded of this everytime I recall that little incident.

It doesn't help to abate the internal pouring torrent of expletives, though.