The Revenge Of Abused Words

When we were children, we used to play a game. I thought it long forgotten, but it keeps popping up in my mind more and more often, and I’ll tell you why.

The game goes like this: a word is chosen, and we are all going to say it, 10 time, 100 times, 1000 times, for as long as we can resist. The idea is that regardless the word, after a number of repetitions, it loses its meaning. You keep on saying it, but it doesn’t resonate anymore in your brain, it is just a bunch of sounds with no sense attached.

You can try this at home. I guarantee that all you need is a half an hour to make any word lose its meaning, provided that you constantly keep on repeating it with a loud voice.

Take the words “nice post”. Isn’t it that you loved to see a comment like that in your first days of blogging? I surely loved it. Then it started repeating, post after post, until it lost its meaning, and finally I realized that it was an artificial finding (called comment spam) meant to increase the number of links pointing to a certain site.

Now take the words “great content”, or “make money online”, or “to your success”. Words with meanings that once upon a time made sense, lead us now to pushing the back button in our browsers, only to get rid of the vacuum sensation that fills (or rather empties) our brains at their sight.

Original thinking people try to pull an alarm string, but the crowd they are speaking about is elsewhere, reading some more marvelous-empty words, and dreaming about celebrity, which is always by the next corner.

Good people spread the word about great initiatives, and reward those they had so much to learn from. Such articles are relaxation for my tired mind.

Cool people step out of the crowd and speak their mind. This doesn’t mean they don’t have respect for anybody. Actually they do.

New projects are rising, now when so many readers were hungry for them.

What shall I say more? Be careful with your words. Improper use may lead to a serious loss of meaning. And of good audience.