Word

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

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There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


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 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

We had words. Each and every evening.

Sometimes, when he stopped for beer after work, we had dishes and pots and food, too.

'Right again, quite right,' said Mr Swiveller, 'caution is the word, and caution is the act.'

Words are like prodigies. They may want to stay inside where it is safe and warm but they'll never live if they never play outside...and find themselves lost in the cold.

A word after a word after a word is power.

(Margaret Atwood)

There is a purity in words that cannot be sullied by their use.

I bought one of those Word-A-Day calendars to improve my vocabulary for college.

reify – to regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

(Mark Twain)

In the beginning was the word, and the word was 32 bits.

Words derive their meaning from the surrounding words, just as human beings derive their meaning from interacting with other humans around them.

Have you ever noticed that the only difference between »word« and »weird« are the vowels?

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Words like winter snowflakes.

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 – Homer (c. 700 B.C.)
 – The Iliad, bk. III, l. 222