"Mom? How do you spell....."

First Grade has been an amazing adventure for my seven year old. I'm so happy to tell you all that she's been bit by the spelling bee...my first love, too! I love prepping with her on Thursdays for her weekly spelling test. She loves it because she's good at it, I love it because it allows for a wonderful weekly bonding opportunity...and lets face it, it's fun for me to watch her learn to love something I've always enjoyed so much.

My first thought when I woke up this morning was this...
Ever notice that Live spelled backwards is Evil...ever wonder about that? What's the opposite of love? Also evol (sounds the same as evil, spelled a little different). But if you add another 1/2 of that word, you have evolve. What's up with this? My Dad was pointing out to me yesterday that one of his new low fat cereals is made by a company called Erehwon...spelled backwards, it's "nowhere". I wonder if the company's key stakeholders realized this? Maybe it's an inside joke that we'll never be privy to, but I'll venture a guess their marketing department knew what they were doing.

Dad and I enjoy a mutual love of words, turn of phrase and double entendre. I'm pretty sure I got that from him. I stare at words and pull them apart, piece them back together, look up the Latin root and figure out a way to use them in a sentence (without being obvious) the next time I speak to someone. Really, it's just a game but I do think it keeps my brain a bit sharper.

Some of my favorite words are nuance, prestidigitation, turpitude, irony, and matrix. Can't just throw these into a sentence without having planned well in advance when and where you'll casually steer a conversation from planting tulip bulbs, to the virtues of a well played sleight-of-hand trick.

Words are wonderful, fun, plentiful, and almost always used in ways, means and forms that are incredibly useful for ongoing human communication. In an ever-evolving commitment to reducing, reusing and recycling, I challenge you to harness the power of words in the same way. Ok, I'm challenging myself and ya'll know how painfully difficult this will be for me. I love to talk. I do it for a living!

Examples of how carefully chosen words have impacted our perceptions are all around us. Our past President's John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, current President Barak Obama, and social leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King have often been described as great orators. Regardless of my own political affiliation, I love listening to their speeches, past and present. They understood the incredible power of a well crafted sentence.

But, for the sake of being succinct and to the point in this blog, I believe words are often used at a time when shutting up and listening are a better plan. From a very young age, my good friend Katie Thayer has enjoyed multiple trips to Japan with her father, and later in life, by herself. On her first trip, she was afraid she would be lost because she wouldn't understand what anyone was saying, and she confided in her Dad that she was pretty sure she'd be lonely. The best piece of advice her father ever gave her on how to conduct herself there (or in any foreign country) was to just be quiet and listen intently. She said she realized that it wasn't important whether people heard her speak, but that she learned through listening and observing all she ever needed to know about the Japanese. And she made friends.

Words are used too often at times without sincere consideration of their meaning and impact. People who casually throw out the words "I love you" without really considering how they feel about that person do a disservice to themselves and the person they're addressing. More to the point, they come across as completely superficial.

I tell my kids I love them every day, sometimes three to five times a day. I mean it, and they know it, and it's my goal to make sure they always know it. Even when we've had a tough day and we're on each others last nerve, they know I love them. I tell my husband I love him on a regular basis, but not because I'm feeling overly romantic. I say it when it counts...like when he's struggling, or overwhelmed, or screws up something he's been working on, or has been impatient with the kids and feels terrible for losing his temper. I don't tell him every day, I allow my actions to communicate that. But I tell him because he needs to hear it and because I want him to know that someone is REALLY on his side. If I said it more often, it starts to lose its meaning...something to say without thinking about what it actually means...a lot like saying "have a nice day". Have you ever said this to someone and walked away thinking "Gosh, I hope she has a really nice day!" For the sake of being sincere, lets just agree that 9 times out of 10, this doesn't cross anyone's mind.

Words, like any important resource, should be used with care and intention. We can treat words like we treat the resources in our environment; economically, purposefully, sparingly and meaningfully, so that we don't find ourselves struggling to find them, abusing them, saying we're using them for a good purpose and denying their domino affect...and damaging something else, releasing them into the air like toxins into the environment.

If you think about this in terms of economic value, it's an interesting equation. The virtues of being a great listener means you get an opportunity to learn without the tax of being considered a know-it-all. You earn interest by reserving your opinion and sharing what you've earned only when you know you can afford it, and there will be appreciation. Words, like energy and money, can be saved for a time when you really need them. And, when you finally use them, their value will have increased to the receiver ten fold because you used them sparingly in the past.

Applying the reduce, reuse, recycle ideal to daily communication only gets tricky when it comes to the recycling part. But I think it means that the reduction and careful reuse of words means you're not going to spend a whole lot more time and energy having to find new ones. Perhaps what it means is we don't need more words, we only need to use the ones we have with more of a conscience.

Oh, and for the sake of brevity: I am crazy about a Beaujolais we've been carrying at the store for a few months, Chateau de la Chaize. Light, fruity and delish!

Enjoy!