2.21.2012

Just A Jumble of Letters

I'm going to do a little bit of bragging here. I got a perfect score on the writing portion of my SAT. Don't ask me how I did it, because I don't know. Actually, I credit my past English teachers for teaching me how to write and speak properly and how not to use bad grammar EVER! When I told my parents about my score, they both told me, "Anna, you're just good with words."

Words. That's something to think about.

I mean, really! Think about it! A word is just a jumble of letters, which are just shapes and symbols, that are put together in a certain order to mean something! An example, you say? I took one of my favorite words, shenanigans, and entered it into an online anagram server. 433 results came up. That's a lot from one word. Granted, most of them didn't make any sense, but that's still 433 combinations of words from 1 other word!

We can interpret those symbols and they can tell us a story. Books, anyone? There's a 5-tier shelf in my bedroom dedicated to the written word. That doesn't include the books under my bed and in my closet since my shelf is full. Book are great! They can take you across the world and put you in situations you'd otherwise never have a chance to be in. I'm never going to live in a cowtown in the 1880s, or England in the 1700s, or India in 1920, but now I don't need to since I got to live there in a matter of 400 pages or less. Words can make us feel emotion. I can't tell you how many sad songs have made me tear up, but some make you happy, too. And--knock knock, who's there? Jokes!

I think Mark Twain hit the nail perfectly on words. (He was pretty good with them, too.)

"The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

I'm not going to elaborate on that. It's just pure genius.

Poetry is another form of turning words into something more than sounds or letters. Poets have the gift of putting just the right words together in the perfect fashion to give the reader (or listener) a mental image and even hear or feel things.

"It sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel.

By and by the boldest stood out of his covert,
To see if time was there.
Nature was in her beryl apron,
Mixing fresher air."

In her poem "Storm," Emily Dickinson (my favorite poet) does all those things. We hear the noise described by the streets "running" and then stopping. We can see the "eclipse" at the window, and we feel their awe. I can even feel the wind and the cool air I associate with a storm.

There are even games dedicated to words! Tell me you haven't played Words With Friends, Scrabble, Boggle, or Bananagrams. You might even be able to include Apples to Apples. (If you can tell me that you haven't played one or all of those games, I'm telling you to go play them now. They're so much fun!)

Now I know we live in the age of technology, so something of the past is going to perish as it always does. (The car eliminated the horse and buggy. The cell phone eliminated the land-line. Playstation eliminated Atari Pong, and X-Box eliminated Playstation.) Something's always gotta go. I just hope that with texting and IM-ing, the proper use of words doesn't perish.

2 is not to/too.
U is not you.
R is not our/are.
UR is not your/you're.
C is not see.
L8R is not later.

Give words the credit they deserve. Write out a whole damn sentence for once! I dont want 2 C U typ3 like dis. Ever!

Well look at that. I just dedicated a bunch of words to words. Silly me.

"Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure."
- Edward Thorndike