Logophile

I am a lifelong Logophile, a lover of words.  Words have been my friends for as long as I can remember. Before I learned to read I remember watching my mother, lost in reading her paperbacks and my dad being totally engrossed in his newspaper. I couldn’t wait to find out what that was all about

As I was growing up, I’m sure my family thought I was lying on my bed reading. But I was actually in England in a haunted mansion, or in Egypt excavating the tombs and reading hieroglyphics, or following Mowgli and Baloo through the jungle.  Words transported me to someplace else, which was exactly where I needed to be.

 I love the way words wrap themselves around your ears and touch your soul.Words spoken or written have the power to heal, wound, inspire and incite.  They change our world. Adolph Hitler used words to incite a whole country to commit atrocities that went against their very nature.  Randy Pausch inspired people to face death with grace and positivity, but to also live life to the fullest in his book The Last Lecture.  Jane Austen made young girls everywhere believe that true love was possible even if the odds were against them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle turned us into amateur sleuths after reading Sherlock Holmes. Social media, through Tweeting and Facebook connected people who were determined to overthrow a corrupt leader in Egypt. 

Words matter. As is evidenced in our schools with all the bullying that is going on today. I remember my mother never allowing anyone to call me “Red”. She didn’t want me to be diminished by a nickname that only spoke to the color of my hair and not who I really was. In grade school some boys would say to me, “I’d rather be dead than red on the head”. This gave me permission to chase them around the playground and show them how weak they were in the running department.

The word vagina can titillate a room full of women who were born with one when they were asked to ponder, “What was my vagina doing in 1988?”

Sometimes our own words can come back to bite us in the butt, for instance, when we make statements like  I would never…

We begin learning at a very early age how to be effective communicators with our words and how we use them.  My son learned early on that whining got him nowhere. 

Everyday I receive A. Word. A. Day  from: https://www.google.com/#q=wordsmith+anagram

I’m still learning.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse