#88 - Words and Mind(1) - The Creation of Words(I) - Why Words?

Hello guys!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Let's begin with a question: Why do we have words?

If your answer is that we use words to express ourselves, you're probably right, that is my answer too.

In our daily lives, we usually use other ways to express ourselves:

. We use our eyes to tell directions or flirt.

. We nod our head to show agreement, approval or greeting.

. We use our facial expressions to convey how we feel.

. We draw or paint to describe scenes.

. We play pianos or other musical instruments to release our inner activities.

. We dance to demonstrate what was happening and how we were thinking and feeling.

Personally, I love to send to friends pictures that represent how I am feeling at the memoment.

Even though, there are many ways there to express ourselves, and in some situations, some of them are more efficient and fun than words, but language still is the most important and popular one.

Now, we have a new question: Why do we use words to express ourselves more often than other ways?

There is a trick to answer this question: Go and try to express yourself without saying a word. If you find it is very hard to do that, you may get some answer for the question.

Some characteristics make language a better media for expression that others:

. Flexibility. Words are just symbols and meaningless in themselves, they are just names referring to other things. We can give a word any meaning we want.

. Accessibility. Almost everyone can learn how to use words to communicate, we don't need talents like in music, dancing and drawing to use words.

. Low-cost. Acquiring a language and using it are extremely cheap, almost cost us nothing comparing to learning music, dancing and drawing.

. Precision. If we want, we could tell every single detail of a thing with words.

. Broadness. With words, not only can we describe concrete things, such as objects, animals or other things we can perceive, but also abstract things, such as time, love or other ideas that we can't see and grasp.

. Efficiency. We can easily to express our ideas and feeling with words, you just need to say "I think ..." and "I feel ...".

. Expandableness.

a. There are 26 letters in English, every word consists of at least one letter, so we can have a massive amount of words in English, with those words we express a massive amount of things.

b. Words can be put together according to rules to express more complex meanings. For example, we have the word "dog", we can combine it with some other words to get a phrase "a big white dog".

c. Words can combine with other symbols to convey some special meanings, including numbers, punctuations and other special symbols, such as "I have 3 books", "Aha!", "abc@gmail.com".

d. Over many years of use, we can add new meanings to a word, so we can use the word to express more meanings, words like "walk", "look" all have more than a single meaning.

e. Base on a word, we can create new words. For example, the word "walk", we have "walker" and "walking".

Okey, In this chapter, I have introduced some of reasons why we use words as our main way to convey information and express our inner thoughts and feelings.

Thanks again and let's learn more words to express ourselves!

Be enthusiastic and be a doer!

^