What Do Words Really Mean?

War.
This word has been used throughout history in very gruesome and ugly expressions and is forever linked with the battlefield, with its unearthly horrors, and with its countless deaths and cries of unbearable pain. I’m sure that the moment you read that word, you had images of injustice, manslaughter, hate, and conflict swarming in your mind. You had images of World War I and World War II. You had images of The Civil War and from there your mind must have inevitably drifted towards justice and its cruelty. You must have cursed at the Nazis and wanted to change the very foundation on which human souls have been built, thinking every human as a futile source of life, hating the cruelness of all those that had commanded and triggered these horrendous wars that you so earlier thought of. And then, you despair and you start to question why war exists, why everything exists and without knowing it, you have befallen into a crater of bitterness that might take a long, long time to overcome, that is, if you ever do happen to overcome it.
It’s rather unbelievable and intriguing that three letters might have such an impact on our very souls. It’s intriguing, yes, but also very, very scary. If this word is enough to push us in a dark, dark abyss with few ways out, then what power do words have, really? This leads me to one of my many thoughts: Do people realize what powerful force they are dealing with? Do they realize that words have the power to destroy, link, remake and fulfill the grandest of dreams? Is this power often taken for granted? Is it misused? What do words really mean?
Red.
Red has a seemingly long history seeing that it is a color and has been used to describe countless things. Red is watermelon, it is apples, it is the blaring, hot sun, and the sandy dunes that purposefully absorb it. Red is the metallic taste of blood leaking from a vein, it is caterpillars making their way with haste towards the tip of a plant, it is also a sign of appalling death. Do you see the link I am trying to create? Do you see how many shapes and sizes, how many variations and poses, a color can take? Do you see what I’m hinting at? Red is but merely three words, the same composition as war, but does it define the same sensation? Does it stand for the same cause? Does it make you feel as if you were something else or does it simply remind you of the things around you… that are red? What is the difference between these two words and their implication in our emotions?
You see, I have said that words are powerful tools that can lift the darkest spirits and unveil the best kept secrets, yet why didn’t red have the same effect that war might have had? What stands between these two small words? It is in fact the human implication in these one-syllable words that change the meaning and that change the very foundation on which these words have been built so long ago, therefore changing the end result that is nestled in your dear heart, making you feel every kind of emotion imaginable. You see, words are mere fabrications of us, the human race. Words would be nothing without souls to write them, to enact them, and to make you feel emotions on the same scale as the ones you felt in the very beginning of this text. It is true that words are powerful sources and can move mountains and sail seas, but is this all possible without someone to mold and guide these stars, and put them into place based on what they want to make people feel? Words ARE very, very powerful things, but not as powerful as the one who holds them. Not as powerful as you, the one reading this text right now, and the one that might someday be a great molder of words, harness its flow just as I have with this text, this mere fabrication that might have triggered something inside of someone, out there in that big world.

With intrigue and hope,
Viki