Okay, the two words that i am going to get rid off from my vocabulary are 'thing' and 'stuff'. Both drive me up the wall and both i am guilty of using in common parlance. What is stuff? What is thing? They really mean nothing and yet are randomly used in our daily conversations to denote almost anything. But anything is not a thing and stuff is not anything we cannot take care to describe or understand. It is so much easier to call fashion 'stuff' or art 'stuff'. We're just to lazy to bother, to make an effort to go into the depth of a particular subject. We like to condemn ourselves to ignorance rather than opening up to natural-born curiosity. All-too-familiar words provide comfort from the strange and the unknown within our minds. They become a little safety-valve to protect us from the overwhelming complexity that surrounds our world. If i am to live deliberately, then vocabulary must become my medium of self-expression and self-understanding. I don't want to find myself stuck with 'things' and 'stuff' that are devoid of meaning and substance. I want them to signify a concrete reality that i am a embedded in, not some vague notion of life and living.
3 comments:
stuff is stuff, as in do you do stuff or you cant do stuff here (ekhane stuff kora cholbe na, i was once told off).
thing is whatever is more than the function of its name, i think. we could agree to live without thing but then i believe wed also have to give up that cute variant -- thingy. that wont be such a good thing
the 'thing' is that the 'stuff' i am talking about goes beyond simple generic usage and cute variants to becoming an alibi to justify our plain laziness to understand that the 'thing' or 'stuff' in question is something that can be explained, described, understood if we make an effort to.
I have the same views about swear words. And two more - "Good" and "Bad"... such shortcuts.
I agree, it is so important to articulate our thoughts, exactly as they rise in our mind, to find the right words, to chisel the dross off the communication and present it to the hearer as I had heard it inside me.
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