Word

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Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

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 – Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
 – An Essay on Criticism [1711], pt. II, l. 109

The word on my mind right now is >>weekend<<. It's only a few hours away!

I can't wait to get away from this office!!

A word has the power to define, to bind, to create, to destroy. Truely, a poet has power undreamt of by kings.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

(Mark Twain)

What I feel for you,
I can't put in words,
language won't hold
my desire.

I bought one of those Word-A-Day calendars to improve my vocabulary for college.

reify – to regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.

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There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


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 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

And then some more words come along and a paragraph is born.

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

The word is powerless yet powerful. The word can be a mere 8 bits, or the flame that burns a city to the ground. Words sting, caress, re-assure, and destruct.

We become wordsmiths innately, learning language before we learn to walk or talk. And still, we continue our development, our love affair with words, until the day we die.

The >>Word of the Day<< today over at dictionary.com is >>oblation<<.

>>Oblation<< comes from the past participle form of the Latin verb* >>offerre<< meaning >>to bring<<.

So, an oblation is an offering or a gift.

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* A Latin verb is traditionally cited by giving four forms, in this case: offero, offerre, obtuli, oblatum.

Have you ever noticed that the only difference between »word« and »weird« are the vowels?

mortar my words
with particles
prepositions
adverbs
and conjunctions

There is a purity in words that cannot be sullied by their use.