Word is

Words can be toys. Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

Words can be tools. Educators serve the tool-like qualities of words. They give us lawyer, doctor, scientist enthusiasts of orderly abstraction. Or artist grunts who lay down guns and pick up pens of battle.

‘When Oliver Stone returned from Vietnam, he enrolled at New York University, studying on the GI Bill. He's been wrestling with those experiences for years, expressing his feelings through a trilogy of motion pictures about Vietnam.’
Bill Moyers Journal

Celebrities crouch behind impotent words, betraying and braying impossible breaches of honor and love.

'I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.’
Tiger Woods

Words can be travesty.

Sometimes words are like music is to a child with Asbergers.

"The music somehow evoked a world in which I felt at home, as opposed to the real world, which I did not feel at home in."
Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic

Words can be salve. Friends in foreign times. Anchors in storm. We keep words around on shelves and blogs and owners manuals just in case the world dissolves and leaves us frail and speechless as the wind.

Word is not all, it is some. It isn’t enough; it’s often rough approximation. Sometimes poets get it right by accidentally bothering to try.

Photo credit Victorgrigas