Most Important Word to Common

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"My journey in love has led me to this place: of loving with my whole heart, of embracing the opportunity to build a life with someone else. I read somewhere that on average people have about sixty thousand words in their vocabulary, but that on most days we use only a fraction of them. As someone who creates with language, I'm fascinated by the shades of meaning and the range of sounds that different words can create. For all the words I may use in an average day, though, the most important word in my vocabulary is love."

Common from the memoir "One Day It'll All Make Sense"

Stories Voice What Can't Be

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"I have said that feelings are the hardest of human responses to put into language. Stories express feelings we recognize, and permit us to identify them, to experience them in language."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 105

Language Evolved

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"Language is what human beings have evolved, over millions of years for conveying meaning."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

The Most Important Tool We Have

"Language is, however, the most important tool human beings possess for producing consciousness. Language, in other words, is an organized report of what is going on – a report that can be stored in memory and retrieved by hearing or reading other relevant language cues."

Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 117

Can't Find the Words

"There have been moments in your life when you had an experience that you know you will have to carry with you to your grave because your are quite unable to find words with which to communicate that experience to anyone. As a matter of fact there simply are no words in any human language to communicate the exactly what you experienced...

You may try to communicate the experience in music or poetry or painting. But in your heart you know that no one will ever comprehend exactly what it was you saw and sensed. This is something you are quite powerless to express, much less teach, to another human being."

- Anthony De Mello. The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of." pg 94.

Most Efficient Signal

"Language is more efficient than any other form of human communication except in one or two special cases, where a touch might be the most efficient signal."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

Alive Through Story

"Children prefer concrete images because they have not yet learned the language of abstraction. When they do they will have lost a powerful human response-code for describing and making sense of their world, unless they keep it alive through story."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 162

Feelings are Prelinguistic

"Feelings, in other words, are prelinguistic; we feel before we 'think' in language. Language is thought. Feeling is more basic, more connected to the animal part of us. Language seems to be best for describing the world outside ourselves; it does not seem well suited to describing our feelings."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 102

Language Fails

"Language is more efficient than any other form of human communication except in one or two special cases, where a touch might be the most efficient signal."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

Sometimes language fails. It's at those times that a hug is the only thing you can say. Great quote.

Games Teach

About “This Little Piggy”

“This is played on five toes with a tickle at the end for the noisy pig. Parents who play games like this with their children are conveying several important messages:

1. I choose to spend time playing with you.
2. I like your toes.
3. Toes can be pigs (metaphor).
4. Language can be fun, play.
5. Stories can be physically felt.
6. I am sharing a tradition of literature with you.
7. I enjoy your pleasure.
8. I respect your intelligence.
9. I like to be a baby too.
10. I like to say poems.”

- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 154

Isn’t it amazing all the things that a little finger play with a baby can accomplish? I think that one of the most important things that any parent can spend on their child is time. This passage just goes to show that the little things in life can carry a lot of meaning and importance.

Happy Monday Everyone!