The Tribune

ALL my life I have been in love. It’s a love I can count on and even when it disappoints me or offends, I find a way to forgive because I know tomorrow is another day.

The object of my affection has no idea how I feel. It is strictly a one-sided love affair and that’s okay with me, too.

I am in love with words. The written word, the spoken word, the humorous, tingling, taunting, mischievous word, the words that when strung together to create a question make you think about something in a way you never thought about it before.

Words are powerful. They can make you or break you. They can inflate your ego or pop it faster than a nail prick in a balloon.

Written or spoken, words can seal a deal or undo what was done. Their roots run deep - in the beginning as a prefix, in the middle as the root, or at the end as a suffix.

Prefixes are hints of what’s to come and they are all-powerful, determining the outcome. Take words like excite and incite, for example, so close, yet with far different consequences.

Prefixes are far more common than suffixes though who knows why, but the ratio runs about seven prefixes to every suffix. Someone reported 9,914 words in the dictionary with the prefix ‘in’. Who has the time to count all the words that start with ‘in’ but whoever did it, thank you for proving that if you google things you never expect to actually find, there is a chance someone got there before you. Personally, I would have been proud to rattle off a hundred words starting with ‘in.’ Nine thousand-plus?

Suffixes have their own charm. Take those that end with the letters ize, an interesting option because it allows you to cheat, legitimately converting a noun into an adjective. Ad becomes advertize; commercial becomes commercialize; national, nationalize; final, finalize; subsidy, subsidize. There are more than 1400 words ending in ‘ize’.

If you think of prefixes as predictors and suffixes as Monday morning quarterbacks, you will always be able to distinguish, though chances of a conversation sinking to the level of prefixes and suffixes are slim. Before we get into the real importance of the spoken word, we need to pay homage to the meat, the middle, since everything at either end hangs on it for substance and meaning. I think of a word’s middle as the trunk with prefix and suffix as limbs but again, I am nuts about words, dwell on them in the middle of the night and appreciate that this probably qualifies me for lifelong psychiatric care, though not at state expense.

Word heritage matters. How much of our language comes from the Greek and yet when we don’t understand what someone is explaining we say things like “It sounds like Greek to me”.

I never meant to prattle on at such length dissecting words, though I suppose it is easier on the eyes and nostrils than the experiments we all did on frogs.

What I set out to do was to share thoughts about how the spoken word can heal or hurt, how careful we must be when a single sentence can alter a life, when the words we use can drive someone away or inspire them to be more than they would have been had those words not be spoken.

We have more than one million words to choose from and countless ways to use them. Heated words, chilling words, beautiful words, cherished words, all readily available at no charge. Yet how often we remain silent, swallowing our words or promising ourselves we will visit someone or call a friend for no better reason than to let them know you were thinking about them. How often we find a reason to procrastinate when it comes to the spoken word, finding as many excuses for not reaching out as we do for not working out, promising ourselves we will share our spoken words tomorrow.

It is the silence that damages us as humans and leaves spectacular chasms in our connections. Never have we had more connectivity and fewer connections to others. How many of us have said to ourselves, “Why didn’t I tell him how important he was, what he meant to me and to others while he was still able to understand?” or “Why didn’t I visit her so we could sit and laugh and cry together before the cancer spread?” or dementia progressed or whatever … you fill in the blank.

We sharpen our skills, writing emails and excusing ourselves from the heavy lifting of friendship, hitting “send” on the keyboard instead of getting into the car, driving across town, knocking at someone’s door and sitting with them. It is oh-so-much-easier to hit send. And in the end, we wonder why we feel an emptiness we cannot explain.

The spoken word, no matter how you dissect it, or try to understand its roots, is what links us all. When we fail to use it, to tell our stories, to unite us as friends and family, to build community, we lose a bit of ourselves for if hope is a powerful weapon, words are the messenger.

So much power in something so readily available, the spoken word. May we use it for good, may we use it to tell our story and to make the story of those around us a little sweeter, kinder, gentler. Not tomorrow, today.

And now I can hit send.