Have you ever said a word so many times it loses all semblance of meaning?  All of a sudden you’ve said … believe …. over and over and over and it stops having any shape, any definition.  It’s just sounds — it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Or have you looked at a foreign word (not just Arabic or Japanese but any language that uses the Latin/Roman alphabet) and thought … this combination of letters makes no sense to me at all?  (I have a lot because I’m currently trying to learn French — my sister-in-law is French and she speaks excellent English and I can say Une coke avec glas sil vous plait in French … and that’s about it). So many people on this planet use words that mean nothing to so many other people.  It’s wild.

I was thinking about these things today while I meditated (probably rendering my meditation useless but ce la vie).  There’s a line in Avengers: Infinity War that Thor says during his first meeting with the Guardians of the Galaxy.  It’s sort of a throwaway line, but John and I love it.  He says,

“All words are made up.”

How TRUE is that?  I mean, if you stop and think about it, so much of the construct of our lives is just … made up.  Not by us but by someone and it was adopted by others and then passed on.  Words were created — seemingly meaningless combinations of letters and sounds — that were assigned to specific things.  And so on and so on, ad infinitum.  

We watched a movie recently about the first editor of the Oxford Dictionary and it made me think about the definitions of words in a whole new light.  I’ve always taken the dictionary for granted but there was a time when there was not a comprehensive list of all the known words and their definitions.  In fact, it’s only about one hundred years old (the Oxford Dictionary, that is).  How wild is that?  Something I’ve just taken for granted as always being available, always existing.  Now it’s an app on my phone (a lovely, well-used one at that!).  But not so long ago … well, the cataloging of words was the Wild West.

Anyway.  That’s what’s on my mind the night before a day at the hospital being reminded how inefficient health care in the USA really is.  Joy.

Xox, g