单选题
Power of Words
Words are living things, the very bodies in which ideas and emotions become materialized. Once an idea or an emotion has been put into words, it acquires infinitely more strength and persuasiveness than it possessed before. It is now a thing more than can be spoken and heard and visualized in imagination. By the power of the word, to an extraordinary extent, we can influence what happens to our lives.
There is a famous old story about an optimist and a pessimist. A half-tumbler of water was placed before them for their inspection, and they were asked to describe what they saw.
"I see," said the optimist cheerfully, "a glass that is half full." "I see," said the pessimist with a heavy sigh, "a glass that is half empty."
There could hardly be a better example of the power of words, and of how word-choice can come to colour our whole mood and outlook. "Full" is a grand word, but "empty" is a lean, lonely word. If we say often enough how full things are, we grow more and more into a fullness of our own. If we say often enough how empty things are, we can make our life-adventure an emptiness indeed.
It happens to everyone of us that we encounter in this life a variety of trials, troubles, disappointments and frustrations. It also happens to everyone of us that we encounter happinesses, rewards, and unexpected blessings. What balance we strike—whether we build on the blessings, and progress into an ever-increase of the good things on the positive side, or whether we magnify the miseries until our life sinks to what an old nurse of mine used to call a "depressingness" on the negative side—this issue can depend to a surprising extent on what spirits we create with words.
How often do we speak of the "agony" of some small discomfort like a cut finger or a pinching pair of shoes? How often do we say, when we are a bit tired at the end of a hard day, that we are "pretty nearly dead"? By the thousands we speak poison-words, doom-words, failure-words; and every time we do so we conjure each depressing idea a little farther into life. "It makes me sick," we say, and in that instant a little ghost of sickness is conjured into being to companion us. "Everything always happens to me." The words come easily. We think they drift away and are gone. But they are not. We have built a little ghost of bitterness to live with. And presently, little by little, the joy has gone out of our world, and now all we can see when we look at the half-full water glass is that it is half empty.
The dictionary is abundant in sunny words, healthy words, happy words, words to utter the good. There is plenty of good to be uttered, certainly. There has been a lot of causes for rejoicing in the lives of you and me. It is not suggested that we should never utter a syllable about the dark side of events. Of course not. But in building an attitude that has a healthiness and constructiveness about it, what kinds of words should we advise ourselves to use? It is simply a psychological fact that we can do immense good to ourselves, and can avoid a great deal of self-poisoning, just by taking a bit of care about what words we use. Out of words, in a very real sense, we build the picture of life that becomes our reality. By words we create the "powers", dark or smiling, that company and rule us.