It’s amazing how a simple sentence can change your mood in an instant; how it can make you imagine stories and situations you would have never thought of on your own; how you can change somebody’s mind or opinion forever. I recently came across a site where people can send in a single sentence to be posted—a sentence to tell a story or help define them. It’s called, quite obviously, One Sentence (http://www.onesentence.org/). Here are a few of the submitted sentences:
“Despite his exasperation, I enjoyed the irony of holding the door for the hotel doorman.”
“I didn't recognize the voice or the number, but the message said, ‘I just thought you might like to know I'm pregnant.’"
“Today, after weeks of avoiding the required parts of my assignment, I had to ask my socially-awkward Japanese pen pal about his sex life.”
“When he was a little kid, my now-gay brother asked my mom when he would turn into a girl.”
Words in today’s culture are, in my opinion, severely misused. In this society of technology—with computers are our fingertips—we take the power of words for granted. With the accessibility of email, we take less time to think through our letters before sending them, leading to more spelling errors, illogic, and often, because of the separation, many rude remarks. With the Internet, gossip spreads faster and news is instantaneous. Even with all of this exposure and dependency on words, most people probably don’t know half of all available words in the English language.
Now, being a wordsmith, I enjoy finding new words. In school, I would love vocabulary lessons because it gave me an opportunity to learn a new way of expressing a thought. Why say ‘dull’ when you can say ‘insipid’? When you hear a word like that, it bears a weight and gives the sentence or thought a certain color (yes, I am an artist, too). If I were to say, “That lecture was dull,” people understand but it leaves the sentence gray and, well, dull. By saying “That lecture was insipid,” you can almost see spite pouring out of the words.
I would also argue that we say too much in our society. Now, I’m not suggesting we all take vows of silence, but that we think about what we’re about to say to that it is concise and truthful. Jonathan Swift, 18th century Irish satirist, wrote a novel called “Gulliver’s Travels.” In it, he described a Utopian society of horses, called the Houyhnhnms. The interesting thing about the Houyhnhnms is that when one approached another, there would be a brief, customary silence before either began to speak. Swift’s character, Gulliver, stated that it made him think about what he had to say. How brilliant would it be if our society thought before it spoke?
I’m going to issue a challenge to my readers. The challenge is to think of a story in your life—whether it is happy, sad, etc.—and write it in one sentence, conveying the depth and emotion it deserves. You then can, of course, submit it to One Sentence if you wish. Try to research different words to express yourself, using engines like rhymezone.com or other thesauruses. Finally, please choose your words wisely.
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