Push at the brackets choking your voice

Words are pretty cool right? These words you are currently reading allow me to address you specifically, and generate some sort of sense in your head so that I as a writer, can communicate with you as a reader. Words allow you to share your secrets with your best friend, disagree with that lecturer you hate and express opinions to anyone that will dare to listen to you. It is largely through words, that we are made known to the world around us. Words help formulate who we are, and how other people perceive us; what we choose to denounce, who we choose to praise, what we choose to question and things we choose to affirm. 

For whatever reason, recently I seem to be coming across a load of new words: dearth, corollary, acquiesce, deleterious and germane, chronicity, spurious, abscond... the list goes on. All these different arrangements of letters with new meanings. A whole array of words that I didn't know.

And this scares me. It scares me that there are hundreds of words that exist that I am unaware of. Hundreds of words that I am unable to use to describe how I'm feeling, how I view the world, how I view injustice.

See, I spend an awful lot of time on social media. I'm a big fan of the fact we can now link GIFS to our tweets, I'm an even bigger fan that there is now a Harambe emoji, and I'm possibly the biggest fan of Bitmoji being linked to snapchat that there ever was.

But thinking about words, and about how they're used, and how they contribute to who I am, I've begun to worry that aspects of society such as social media are unintentionally pruning our vocabulary.

See, right now, when you say something I disagree with, all I have to do is respond with '💩'.
If you say something nice to me, I only have to reply with '😘'. The same applies to responding with generic insults or phrases. Trump only has to tweet something else ridiculous for me to quote retweet with the astute observation: "What a W****r".

"Hillary is a sore loser": 'what a d***head'

"I love Putin": 'you're a complete k***'

Maybe, if i'm feeling particularly scathing:

"Meryl Streep is overrated": '🙄'

Perhaps that's why it is so powerful when someone like Obama, or Meryl Streep completely denounces the president elect without even uttering his name. Their eloquence and articulation overrides any emoji, any GIF, any quick-witted insult.

Sometimes using words are scary. Telling someone how we actually feel, or what we actually think using words can be terrifying.

So we reduce them down to emojis, and GIFS, and bitmojis, robbing the words of their power and diluting their sentiment. Because God forbid we let the words expose us.

But as JK Rowling - the ultimate queen of words - once said:

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

Our words are our voice. And we can choose what we do with them. We can squeeze them into binary categories - a happy emoji here and a pair of praying hands there, or we can use them to express viewpoints, expand nuance and stand up for those whose words are being silenced.

 In a climate where 'fake news' is abundant, and truths get twisted and tainted in mainstream media, words are more precious than ever. They need to be protected. 

Speak up and speak out. Use your words. Push at the brackets choking your voice and dare them to censor you.