Schindlersword

Word Users Manual

Words are older than stories

Stories tend to get mistaken for evidence, and we often treat them that way.

Mistaking _____ (fill in the blank) for what it is not, is a common mistake, but that doesn’t make it right.

With stories, it is merely a mistake. But with words, well, it is beyond words because words are older than stories and, therefore, can tell you more about you than a story ever could.

For who you are, you have stories, names, family, friends, school, and government to help you figure it out.

But what you are is all up to you.

Many are struggling with it because it depends on whom you ask.

When you ask the internet, you are human, body, mind, spirit or, 25.27 billion results at Google.

When you ask stories, you are an accident, from Mars, from Venus, the 1, the 99, the world, the champion, and the list goes on.

When you ask words, you is you.

Before Words, you doesn’t exist for self-evident reason.

After Words, it is still only a word, nevertheless, you know first-hand how it came about, also known as knowing your roots.

Though an estimated 400 generations apart, we and our ancestor are one and the same — wordless in the beginning, wordy in the middle, and wordless again in the end.

Knowing your roots is as good as having them and, for that, words have stories blowing in the wind.

Word is: Missing

Although words are why we are here, they are missing from what we consider a historic event, an epic invention, a wonder of the world, a great story ever told, or a topic worth being taught at school.

The reason is simple: We don’t value things, we value their meaning.

Without meaning, nothing happens — which explains the current state of the word in the world.

Words are: Pictures

The wordless invented pictures long before they invented words to describe them with.

That, we know from cave paintings that are 30,000 years older than the first words on Earth. But it took the invention of many words before pictures could achieve what is now taken for granted:

A picture speaks a thousand words.

It’s not a magic trick, it’s what word-users do — they love to use their words.

Words are: Numbers

Numbers are a word-class apart for a number of reasons.

The wordless use them

Pine-cones, broccoli, lilies, roses, daisies, and marigolds, to name a few, have used the Fibonacci number, also known as the golden number, for as long as they can remember.

Without a brain? Before Fibonacci figured it out? Who would have thought? But that’s not all.

Numbers are clear

In contrast to the times a word-user mistakes a word for another, which is in the thousands, the times a word-user mistakes zero for one, or one for a dozen, can be counted on the fingers of a hand or two.

Things have changed

Mathematicians used to believe the universe is written in math and the uni-verse should be called uni-math instead. But things have changed. Even the mathematicians now agree math is a word.

Words are: Dream

Wordless

The wordless don’t dream for self-evident reasons.

Wordy

In the wordy world, dreams are where meaning is absent. That makes dreams the only place to go where the absence of meaning is a feature. Meaning gets attached to dreams after the dream is over, is usually how it works.

On top of that, dreams come in a variety of shapes and sizes—fleeting, deep, profound, day, night, and life-changing.

While this explains the popularity of dreams, it also confirms we don’t live in a dream-world.

We live in a word-world.

Words are thoughts

The word-less

In the word-less world, also known as evolution, nature, or the wild, thoughts don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

The word-full

Among the word-users, the tendency is to think it is our thinking that got us here, makes us unique, and separates us from the word-less, that is from everything except us.

Or as Henry Ford would have it, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.” Put differently, the priority of the conditioned mind is to be right.

Kidding aside, thinking matters, of course, but at the same time everybody knows that the world we live in—complete with the promoters of “Life sucks and then you die,” “The doomsday clock is nearer to apocalypse than ever,” “I see no hope for the future”—is, in fact, the world of our own making, and it won’t be changed, let alone made better, by the same thoughts that create it.

To believe, as if in the beginning were the thought, it is our thinking that got us here would be forgetting what got us here in the first place.

We cannot change what is. In the beginning is the word no matter what. But you can tip the balance in your favor.

Think good words.

“Words become works.” – Seneca

Words are: Everything and Nothing

Who was first, the wizard of Oz, or the wizard of words?

Well, when words were new, anyone could come up with a new one. Every child could do it. Be it as it may, it didn’t take our ancestors long to figure out there are two types of words.

The 1st word-type: The words for the things you can hear, smell, taste, touch, and see.

The 2nd word-type: Words that require IQ.

Scrolling back the years to 10,000 years ago, keep in mind that at the time, eye cue reigned supreme and IQ hadn’t been invented yet.

1st type of words: Sun

With the 1st type of words, it didn’t take our ancestor long to discover that when you repeatedly say “sun” while pointing at it, the need for the sun fades away and your audience can be made to see a sun just by saying the word.

Thus, tele-vision was invented.

Tele Vision

Many believe tele-vision is a recent invention, however, nothing could be farther from the truth. Call our ability to make assumptions a type of delusional trance or simply being mistaken, fact is:

“The soul never thinks without a picture.” – Aristotle

Though Aristotle put it in words for everybody to see only much later, our ancestor had already bitten into the apple, hence knew about words’ tele-vision feature, from the sun, 10,000 years before the invention of TV 94 years ago.

2nd type of words: Truth

Anyone could come up with truth, but to make others believe truth not only exists, but in a book you have a copy of, then as now, poses a different challenge altogether.

For example, you could say purple cow without breaking a sweat, but getting your audience to believe what you said took work, maybe more than we’ll ever know.

At the time, to believe, our ancestors demanded proof, that is, they demanded to see it with their own two eyes.

That means, for a start, that our ancestor who came up with purple cow had to paint a cow purple first, and then take the cow to the audience, or the audience to the cow, hoping it wouldn’t rain. Imagine the time and energy just to get that first purple cow into people’s heads. However, it was worth every minute and calorie because if it weren’t for the purple cow, we’d still demand proof.

Whether a word happened or not doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that it is true.

Storytelling

Once it worked with truth, the race was on for what the children (the younger the better) should hear at school. That is how storytelling began, and with it…

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest story of them all?

… Earth’s longest-lasting beauty contest ever. As well as the most divisive and deadliest.

Marketing

I’m not suggesting competing stories are how marketing began. All I’m saying is everything marketing knows, it knows from the marketing of words.

Nothing

Everything is a word. Nothing is a word. That, I think says more about words than a word-user ever could.

Why we are

Words are why we are here.

But how it happened is the secret of the wordless because when it happened, storytelling hadn’t been invented yet.

To understand what that means, we must return to when it all began.

Before Words

The wordless managed the first 99.9997% of the energy and time on Earth without us. Some of us believe that is why it took them so long – 4.65 billion years – to come up with words in the first place. Kidding aside, for the purpose and scope of this user manual, it is the birth of Earth that started the stimulus-response also known as the past or evolution:

  • The elements (fire, air, wind, water)
  • The cells
  • The plants
  • The animals
  • The eyes
  • The brain

When the above are read from top to bottom, they are the stimuli.

When read from the bottom up, they are the responses.

Words

Why did the wordless invent words only after they had already invented the cells, plants, animals, eyes, and brains first? What made them decide the right time for words on Earth had come approximately 13,750 years ago?

That it happened, we can bet our money on, but why is a mystery. When it happened, the only thing present was what spoke the first on Earth – presumably an animal of the homo type – and the witnesses have long gone.

  • Until the invention of words, the wordless had the planet all to themselves, but now they have to share it with us.
  • The appearance of words has forever divided Earth into the wordless and the wordy.
  • Just as “the chicken was the egg’s idea for getting more eggs” (Marshall McLuhan), so the word-users are word’s idea for getting more words.

After Words

The last thing the word can be accused of is to have fallen asleep on the job of going forth and multiply.

On the contrary, words have multiplied from absent to billions – according to those who claim to have counted them – in just the 0.0003% of the Earth-Time they have been around.

As if by coincidence, in the same 0.0003% of Earth-Time, the word-users have also multiplied from absent to billions.

The two events, the growth in the number of words and in the number of word-users at the same time, seem to be related. What appears obvious is that words couldn’t have done it without the word-users, and the word-users couldn’t have done it without the words.

  • Talk
  • Write
  • Print
  • Press
  • Telegraph
  • Typewriter
  • Telephone
  • Radio
  • TV
  • Computer
  • Internet

Stimulus-response rules. The above, too, when read from top to bottom, are the stimuli, and when read from the bottom up, the responses, each serving word’s idea of more words.

The internet is the most successful because it gobbles up, stores, and disseminates more words faster than all of the previous responses combined.