Robbing me off my words

Words are only one form of expression of thoughts and feelings. It is said that non-verbal communication plays a major role in our lives. But to me, words seem to hold more importance as they often come after filtration through mind but face-expressions, voice, personality is more deceptive and constantly changing depending on our mood and emotions.

Now the words we use to describe any situation observation, feelings or emotions are also what we think about that situation. Sometimes it happens that we do not find words exactly according to our observation or what we actually feel to say. But when this problem persists, then our thinking, feeling and observations also in turn becomes limited to our capacity of using correct words. This means to say that richness in our language affects the richness in our power of observation and thought.

Now coming to our generation’s speaking and writing traits, we can safely call them pathetic. Due to our own negligence and culture of comfort, and due to growing prevalence of social networking, the power of words in giving any message have diminished and so have the quality of messages. In mobile and internet communication, not only our grammatical and vocabulary related mistakes are ignored but also our inability to code the message into compact and precise words are excused. In fact, it has become part of modern fashion to make as many mistakes as possible in a single message and still deliver the message!

If we see our day to day conversations, there is exclusive collection of words that everyone uses to describe everything. Bhayankar, Ultimate, Bhokal, Maal, Class, Phodu, Fundu, Phadu, Todu, Machau, Mast, Sahi, Classic: these are the adjectives that we utilize to pinpoint the situation or personalities at hand. Vagueness of these words clearly suggests vagueness of our minds. These words often named as College Lingo are being used indiscriminately across the college campuses and afterwards in our daily life. When watching cricket, we ascribe a good shot played to simply a classic shot, not knowing what classic shots means actually. Even in cricket commentaries, words have become fixed for every situation. When visiting a place, we say it is ultimate, sahi, mast, phadu but do not have a slight notion of what we actually feel and want to say. In movies, the words are so limited and overused that only one different word can be said as the theme of the entire movie. Lyrics of songs have also deteriorated in quality of language though some lyrics writers are still trying to maintain the standard of songs through innovatively mixing other languages such as Urdu and Arabic words. In newspaper too, the conditions are no better. The stress there is on color, images, and headlines rather than on words and texts.

And there is another issue of using our mother tongue or second learned language. For most of us, Hindi remains the mother tongue while English is the second language. In this case, getting and retaining proficiency and richness in both the languages becomes a challenging task. In fact, it is a very rare chance that one can speak or write both the languages unerringly without mixing their words. We are also used to first think in our mother tongue then convert it into second language. After years of practice only, one can think in both the languages and then convert that thinking into words with equal precision.

Due to the growing stress on English, mother tongue such as Hindi are left ignored. People feel themselves inferior if they cannot at least use some English words in between Hindi. When people can christen all English words in their talking, it is a matter of vanity. But research have also shown that a child gets accustomed to his/her mother tongue in initial years of cognitive ability development and afterwards in school time, when he/she is rigorously taught in English only then the deterioration of both languages is definite. By learning and adhering to Hindi only, I think, one can learn quality English. Otherwise most of the time, we would be using words whose meaning is not distinctively clear to us in either of the languages.

At the cost of the possibility of being blamed for exaggeration, I would say that words are our identities. We eat, consume, work, sleep, talk, watch, listen, read, write but the thing that remains is only words. If you rob me off my words, you take away everything.