*“As of July 2021, en.wiktionary has over 791,870 gloss definitions and over 1,269,938 total definitions (including different forms) for English entries alone, with a total of over 9,928,056 definitions across all languages.”
1,269,938 definitions
Word Users Manual
21.36 billion words
According to Wikipedia, we now own 21.36 billion words across the world’s dictionaries.
37.725 billion words
155 billion words
“English-Corpora.org is the most widely used collection of corpora (highly searchable collections of texts) anywhere in the world. The corpora are used by more than 130,000 people each month, from more than 140 countries. In addition, hundreds of universities worldwide have academic licenses, which provide their users with expanded access to the corpora.
The corpora have been used as the basis of thousands of academic articles, theses, and dissertations, and they form the backbone of courses on language and linguistics throughout the world, at all levels of instruction. Virtually every book on “teaching English with corpora” in the last 5-10 years has focused primarily on these corpora (which are also sometimes called the “BYU Corpora”, for the university where they were created). Since the first corpora were released in 2005, a total of seventeen corpora have been created.”
The state of the world
The world of our own making
What if words were just a dream? It would appear the wordless world would be here, but we wouldn’t be here talking about everything we have a word for.
Is 2021 the world of our own making?
Or is it the world of words’ making?
Perhaps the answer depends on which came first: The word-user or the word?
On top of the food chain
The pursuit of better has paid off. We’re on top of the food chain, the most advanced specie ever, ready for fast food on Mars, the high-water mark of evolution.
All things considered, we are at crossroads: What next?
That is like asking where have words gotten us thus far, isn’t it?
Who decides?
“Too little too late” say some, and “Too much too fast” say the others. But on one thing most everybody agrees: “NOT more of the same old, please!”
More only mirrors itself, and so does more of the same.
Celebrate what unites us
I wanted to write a book that gives people hope and helps to see the world from a fresh perspective in lasting ways.
The day when I would give it the most boring title in the universe was years away. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined that. But all hope is not lost..
War will not end if we keep telling the stories that create it, and fighting the old doesn’t work so well. It takes an alternative and words have the following features working in their favor.
- What divides us are not the words. On the contrary, they unite us. What divides us is what we do with words.
- In the the beginning is the word no matter who is telling it.
- Words don’t speak for themselves.
And with time on our side, I think a fresh perspective on words stands a chance of making it.
When we change the way we look at words, the world changes.
There are no guarantees, of course not. After all, this manual is just more of the same in its own right.
New paths
A lone wolf howling at the moon I am not, nor do I feel that way.
On the contrary, new paths are sought and found everywhere by more word-users than ever before, non-stop.
“When you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”– Martin Keogh
Golden opportunity
The world’s religionists and scientists agree–for the first time ever, “Finally!” some would say—on the one thing that can be denied only by confirming it: Everything they’re talking about is a word. Ditto for nothing.
To change the status quo, I feel that might be as good as it gets.
Fewer words
Only because we have had such good experiences with getting from wishing for words to drowning in them, the option of fewer words in the future is still an option, not for the first time, but all the more so.
Impossible is nothing.
In the wordless world
The Earth travels around the sun. People die and new ones are born. Buds blush around the stem. Leaves fall when the autumn calls. The seasons keep on changing and:
“All the rivers run into the sea
yet the sea is not full
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.
It is raining today
in the mountains.
It is a warm green rain
with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.
Birds happen music
like clocks ticking heaves
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.
A slow rain sizzles
on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again.”
– Richard Brautigan (The Return of the Rivers)
(Source: http://www.brautigan.net/)
Seen from afar, it seems the wordless just can’t get enough of it. They want more of the same every time the sun sends her early rays shining down on half of Earth at a time.
In the wordy world
The wordy make the best of it, each their own, many quietly, some aloud.
Some keep announcing to anyone willing to listen that the end of the world is as imminent right now as it’s been for thousands of years, only more so this time around.
Your best options, they want you to believe, is living in fear of getting run over by a self-driving vehicle tomorrow, or if that fails, to live in fear of the world exploding any day now, or if that fails, to get ready for the sky falling on our heads tomorrow.
Simplify
Simplification works best where it begins, before it is let in to get complicated.
The world’s dictators being among the world’s best educated and best informed on Earth, makes you wonder what knowledge, education, information, and intelligence are for. I’m not saying simple will result in fewer dictators, all I’m saying is fewer morons of low moral standards and some mastery of words, rather than more of them, would do the world a whole lot of good. But that’s about morals, a different story altogether.
On the upside, we have arrived at the point where more word-users than ever before agree…
…more of the same is not the answer anyone in the pursuit of peace is looking for.
As words are concerned, the question of more words is more compared to what? Pick any number between 155 billion and zero, and you’re probably not far from the truth.
- Only the grammarians know
- .14 billion words
- 1.27 billion definitions
- 21.36 billion words
- 37.725 billion words
- 155 billion words
To put the 155 billion words into context of time: 155 billion seconds will last the next 4,915 years. That begs the question of how does anyone count 155 billion of anything, let alone words?
I asked that question and found each of the above numbers have been achieved.
Words have: Rules
Word rule #1: IT IS A WORD
If you can hear, see, touch, smell, taste, or feel it, it is a word.
Word rule #2: NEVER ANOTHER
A word is never another.
Word rule #3: TALK OF WORDS
“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating.” – Patrick Rothfuss
Word rule #4: CANNOT BE DENIED
A word can be denied only by confirming it.
Word rule #5: WORDS CAN DO TO YOU
What words can do to others, they can do to you, and if you respond to words like others, they probably will.
Word rule #6: IRREVERSIBLE
Attention to words is irreVERSEable. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Words do
Words don’t do. They just are.
That is because words are not made of matter. They are empty inside, also known as massless and, therefore, even more elusive to catch than Neutrino, the ghost particle.
Words couldn’t matter if they tried, and for this and other reasons as well, words:
- Don’t have an opinion
- Don’t speak for themselves
- Don’t talk bad of word-users
- Don’t care what you do with them
- Don’t lie
- Don’t play games
- Don’t have meaning
- Don’t make sense
- Don’t describe the world
The one with the senses, the sensational one, is you.
Word is: Truth
Wordless
In the wordless world, truth doesn’t exist for self-evident reasons.
Wordy
Among the word-users, there are two types, those who are looking for truth, and those who claim to have found it.
According to Google, true is “about 4.24 billion results,” Wikipedia took the short-cut: “True most commonly refers to truth,” and some claim the wisest and noblest teacher is nature.
“Will the real truth please stand up!” risks to start another disagreement among those who claim to have found it, and by the end of the day it’s the same old “Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest truth of them all?” all over again.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest truth of them all?
For the adults, it is okay because we have gotten used to it, but to the children, true is just another fairy tale.
Mirrors do not determine who is right, only who is competing, which explains, I think why the truth doesn’t work so well.
Fresh perspective
True is a word, and what truth tells us about words is whether a word happened or not doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it’s true.
There are no truths here, only words. What word-users do with each is a different story entirely.
There’s nothing the writer can do about it, for what it’s worth: A point of view.