Words, Words, Words...Alive and Well

Have the courage to live. Anyone can die. -Robert Cody

I was searching through a website where I find my Emily Dickinson poems. It has this index of the first lines of each poem. As I was searching for a poem to dicuss in my last blog for the week, I saw the first line of the poem this entry is about and I laughed. "A word is dead." seems like such an unusual topic for a poem that I found myself wondering what makes a word dead. Read what Emily Dickinson's thoughts are on the situation:

A WORD is dead.
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Before I read this poem I thought to myself for a moment what I thought about a word being dead. I came up with dead languages such as Latin and so I came to the conclusion that a dead word would be a word that had dropped out of the use of the population. According to Emily Dickinson most people think a word is dead when it is first said but she believed that is the day that it begins just to live. I then realized that Emily Dickinson was trying to convey that words were not just a combination of vowels and consonants but have actual meaning and their meanings also give them a life source. Words are living beasts that surround our society which is one hundred percent true. People use words with purposes of hurting, loving, appreciating, criticizing, or informing. It is a new way of looking at words and is actually really thought provoking. Words are given their purpose by the person but they then hold onto that purpose. People give them purpose and life and then sustain it.