Words, Words, Words

By Shlomo Maital

        On April 27, 2008,  5,735 days ago, I posted Blog #1 on WordPress.  It was about a prisoner in Australia who maintained sanity in solitary confinement by inventing a game with a button.   I then posted the link on Facebook – and continue to do so, almost daily.

          Today, January 9, 2024, nearly 26 years later, I posted blog # 2053,  about why our senior memories sometimes forget yesterday but recall yesteryear. 

          Words, words, words.

          Some 2,053 blogs, averaging around 487 words, (but often, longer, too long), totaling a million words, roughly.  That is more than 12 times the number of words in the Five Books of Moses.   And nearly double the number of words in the English translation of War and Peace (587,287).

           What is it that drives some people like me to spill so many words into the Internet?  

            I think I understand now why writers write. 

            We write to understand.

             We write, so that we are compelled to state in words, with sharp clarity, what we think.  Because until you shape vague thoughts into sentences and phrases, read them and revise them, you do not really know accurately what you think and believe. 

             So, why blog?   The thinking is, maybe others will find interest, amusement and insight from those words.  And hey — you may always decline to waste time reading them. 

             Words matter.  Words can bring useful knowledge – or they can wound and destroy. 

             Are our children and grandchildren learning to express themselves and to write clearly? Once, they did. We have a hunch that in general, today, they are not. 

             Are words subject to the rules of truth?   Often, today, they are not.  Truth is in trouble.

             Perhaps it is time to rethink how we use, abuse, and amuse, with words.  And reject seditious, insurrectionist political leaders who abuse words and call their opponents vermin and ask them to “rot in hell”.