The average person will speak some 5.8 million words in the coming year of 2024. No wonder they say your mouth is the strongest muscle in the human body! And, what if I told you that you could eliminate all but fifty-five of those words and by so doing gain an extra five months each year? You would probably tell me to stick my head in a bucket of ice water. Naturally, we can’t all go around in a vice grip of silence, but perhaps we could resolve to take pause and pick our words more carefully in the new year.
There are so many good one-liners out there in the lexicon arena, so many great phrases and funny idioms, it’s impossible not to get in the ring with them, isn’t it?... You know, take a big new shiny word out for a spin. But those are all too often the same arenas where words go to battle with lions. Somehow, our grandmothers and grandfathers were able to use their pleasantries with such character I wonder why I don’t begin and end each day with a few of them for good measure, and skip trying to explain myself during the rest of the time!
If I came to my grandmother’s breakfast table back in the day, for instance, wearing my grumpy kid face and Zorro pajamas, she might have said “Looks like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed,” or some similar phrase that got her message across in the simplest of terms. I always loved the substitute phrases they had for swear words like “Fiddlesticks!” or “Jiminy Cricket!” or perhaps “Raspberries!” on a really bad day. My grandmother delivered those euphemisms with such volume and emphasis that, once heard, caused anyone in our family to slowly slink out of the kitchen, and made cussing obsolete around our house.
During my early years when art to me was merely a nickname for Arthur, my mother noticed I had taken a fancy to writing words in different styles. I called it lettering but in art it’s called calligraphy. My discovery of different fonts was a complete and innocent accident. A friend and I, bored to tears in music class, began passing sheets of lettering back and forth to bide our time. The idea was for each of us to begin with a category, like “Diseases,” and then write out examples using one of our invented typefaces. As I passed my friend my latest disease, like S-C-U-R-V-Y done in Boldface Brush Script he would in turn pass me his paper filled with examples of, say, “Reasons to Call 911.” Back and forth our notebook pages went, slowly filling the spaces with ingenious lettering styles. Unfortunately, our musical acumen never improved, but alas, our development as young graphic designers made major headway. And to the benefit of my mother, my skills were soon put to work on lettering projects of one sort or another.
While I had never thought of my creative ventures as anything but a way around chores, my mom had different ideas. Ever the unfocused child, I was happy to dive in to her latest lettering assignment and bypass homework like memorizing the digestive organs of a grasshopper, or wracking my brain on math problems like this one:
If Sonny rode his bicycle to the pool eight mile away at five miles per hour hoping to meet his friend, how long would it take Max to catch up with him if he grabbed the back of a moving semi-truck going seventy- five miles per hour that was four hours away?
I know. If your answer when you were in school was like mine, you simply wrote down that Max was toast at the end of that ride.
However, the problems my mother put in front of me weren’t that dangerous. One Sunday, taking delight from the insert of our local newspaper, my mother laid in front of me a list of the six most important words, (then five and so on) – affirming sayings we humans could share with each other, positive ways to lift the spirit of our fellow man. Soon after, I delivered her the newly lettered art which she framed and hung in her office, and in her home thereafter. Here they are for your absorption:
The six most important words: I ADMIT I MADE A MISTAKE
The five most important words: YOU DID A GOOD JOB
The four most important words: WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?
The three most important words: IF YOU PLEASE
The two most important words: THANK YOU
The one most important word: WE
The least most important word: I
As the new year quickly approach-eth, it seems worthwhile to share this list with you, in the hope that you add them to the millions of word possibilities you will attempt in the year 2024, to work them into conversations whenever you can, and to observe the intimacy and friendships that flow forth when you do. There’s not a one of these phrases that is difficult to include to your repertoire of pleasantries each day, and you might decide to even try them in combinations. These words were like food for the soul in our family growing up, and they helped eliminate those battle grounds, those arenas when our words become warriors that hurt or shamed. My mother used them more than anyone I ever knew, with my wife runs a close second behind her, a fact that is my living grace when I am tempted to don my armor and do battle with lions.
At church, our humble small group have taken it upon ourselves to add to the Six Most Important Word list by coming up with the seven, eight, nine or ten of the most important words. If you think of a positive addition to add, even if it is the forty seven most important words, please share your brilliance with me at Knee Deep and together we’ll help get 2024 off to a roaring start.
If my mother was here, she’d hand you a pen and say, “You can do it,” (four) or “I’m behind you one hundred percent,”(six) and maybe even frame what you had done for her home. In any case, you would certainly know how she felt about your creation when she held your calligraphy out to admire, like she did mine, give your hand a squeeze and say these TEN most important and affirming of words:
“No one could ever do this any better than you.”