“Words cast spells, that’s why it’s called spelling. Words are energy, use them wisely.”
One day I found this quote and knew that it was the best one to summarise my feelings about words. I often mention it early in the sessions, with young students especially. Their usual reaction is to laugh, in a slightly dismissive way as if to say: ‘she has lost the plot a bit…’ but then I ask them to remember one word they heard a lot when they were younger, a word that was associated with them, given either by their family, their teachers or their peers, a word that may have started as a bit of joke but stuck to them like honey though it wasn’t necessarily a sweet word: ‘funny, shy, lazy, stupid, annoying, serious, trouble, incompetent, etc…’
My word was ‘difficult’. It stuck to the extent that, when visiting my extended family, my sister would be introduced by her first name and I would be introduced as ‘the difficult one’. These words cast a spell on us, and sometimes, when they are not so sweet, a curse. They are like barbed arrows in our hearts and very hard to take out, without bleeding. Words are certainly energy, beware which ones you choose and how you use them; they have the power to make or to undo something, or someone.
This is why I have always been fascinated by words … and for many other reasons.
To be continued….
