one word too many

The more words people add to their vocabulary, the less they start making sense. Words are picked up not to make things clear, but to obscure them. It’s like a weapon that was supposed to protect but turned into a killer. In conference halls around offices, in schools and in politicians’ speeches, in court room orders and bureaucrats’ notices, in doctors’ diagnosis and in our conversations, words are being employed very effectively to say anything but what really is. The need to be untruthful may have been the single most driving factor behind a vocabulary’s development. We were doing fine as 2-year olds. Saying yes and no. Asking for this or that, telling what we liked and what we disliked in plain and simple words. And then as we grew up we discovered we could presume, we could hazard a guess and put things mildly. We cloaked simple affirmatives and negatives under layers of words. We say a lot when we want to mean the least. Like now, when all one is trying to say is to keep things short, simple and true to their meaning.