Dead Word Walking

I’ve been wondering lately about how words dry up and wither and I came to the conclusion that overuse is the ultimate word-killer and blood sucking vampire. This is how:

Imagine a relationship situation, where a couple exchanges the notorious “I love you” statement hundreds of times during the relationship. What happens? It dries up. It becomes redundant to the point of death. Unable to convey the meaning of the word “love” anymore, it becomes “standard procedure” instead.

Imagine a political situation, where leaders from all around the world express the need for “democracy” over and over and over again. What happens? As with love, the meaning dries up until democracy becomes a dead walking corpse, devoid of any essence (especially when war machines like George Bush keep uttering it). Another example from the world of politics is “reform” or “isla7” in Arabic. Now that’s a REAL corpse especially in the Arab world, also declared dead as a result of overuse, misuse and abuse.

Imagine that instead of reform we say “make better” or “clean”. Because really, even the word reform is just a fancy way of saying “fix” or maybe if we’re too attached to the prefix re-, maybe we can just say “recreate” instead of “reform”.

Instead of democracy and democratic, we can say “rule of the people” or “peopleatic”. Think of the distance created between the word democracy and our understanding of what it really means. We don’t speak Latin or ancient Greek anymore, so how would we understand that “demo” means people and democracy = rule of the people?

This makes me think; maybe it’s time to become a little creative and invent new words to replace our decaying corpses, so that we can pump a new word with the freshness of meaning and new energy; so that maybe, just maybe the REAL message or meaning behind the word can be conveyed or comprehended.

Words are like people; we grow old, our health deteriorates and ultimately we end up in the grave. It’s time to face the fact that some words have simply died and that we cannot raise the dead.

Also, it just occurred to me that the words that we like to murder most, are the very words that carry the meaning of our most cherished values.

R.I.P: DEMOCRACY, REFORM AND LOVE.