On Words as Starts + Caught Up

On Words as Stars

 

"I could change my clothes and my mannerisms, my hair color and accent, but some small gesture would probably

give me away. Yet I could tell the story of a true event that really happened to me, but, in the words I choose to use, transform it into something it was not."

This MOE interested me because it shows the power of diction and wordplay. Puns and entendres are just some ways in which a sentence can be manipulated to control a story or outcome. Furthermore what is an identity without its most important piece of information, your name? Lastly, its easier to lie in narration than it is physically. Subconsciously, we always give some clue that we are lying. A twitch of an eye, a glance to the left. I agree with what Kate Ray is saying, that words are the ultimate weapon of choice for the liar.

"Yet we can feel the failure every time we feel or see something that we find impossible to express, every time we feel “frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth”"

I've experience this frustration before, but I've also experience a sense of happiness as well. Though at certain times it annoyed me that I could not put a feeling or sensation into words, I also enjoyed the uniqueness and solipsistic nature of my encounter. You won't know what many things in life are like until you actually try them. Everything from sky diving to having a Brooklyn style pizza. That is why even though I can say that the pizza is cheesy with a thick sauce and crusty bread, I cannot describe what the pizza actually tastes like. In short, a lack of words to share an experience is not always a negative thing.


"The nature of the truth that they write about, however, is that it is in itself ambiguous. Writing directly about truth is always false, because truth cannot be pinned down to a word or a single sentence."  I completely agree with this statement. There is no such thing as absolute truth because there can be degrees of truth in anything. If a man robs a bank, he is considered immoral. However, if we later find out that he did so to save his daughter with a brain tumor, is he still a bad guy? Truth, much like the taste of a pizza, is ambiguous in that it is a concept and nothing more. It doesn't have an existence outside what we assign to it, therefore you can't pin it down. Time for instance, might feel slower to one person than it does to another. This will forever be a dilemma for the writer and philosopher. Caught Up

"The point is that I have trouble with words. I dislike the way they invade my life and open it up for misinterpretation. I detest the way they jumble in my mouth, and then come out all wrong. And sometimes, I lament the way they do not come out at all."
I think this is an extreme situation. I cannot say that I have trouble with words or "dislike the way they invade my life" because there so much variety that you can choose what message you want to get across and how you want to do it. The only matter I can relate to is when I have been at a loss for words and then hated myself for not having said something I should have. With that aside however, I have never scrambled sentences or had trouble expressing my ideas. "Woolf says that it is not until an author is dead that his words can speak clearly, thus “purified of the accidents of the living body.” When the speaker or writer leaves his words behind they are free to take on new meanings, even
meanings that it is hard to believe the speaker or writer intended."

This line intrigued me because I've never given this idea much thought before. When the writer is alive, their is a definitive meaning because people can simply ask him/her, "what do you mean?" But when the author is dead, suddenly things are open up to interpretation because there is no longer a point of reference. This makes me curious whether our understanding of Shakespeare, Plato and the like are all accurate or not.