The Power of words

[letric]

Lexbarker, how a few words can change everything! Indeed,
words. are the most powerful drug used by mankind.

[letric]

People say it is good to talk, but writing our thoughts down
is powerful, too. Expressive writing helps the mind process
traumatic events or major life changes in a positiver dynamic
way.

[letric]

Writing about our life events, including the most painful, is something diarists and letter-writers
have done for centuries. But more recently the practice of writing to improve our mental and
physical health and heal trauma has been seen from a scientific perspective., Our minds are
designed to try and understand things that happen to us. When traumatic event occurs or we
under go a major life transition, our minds work overtime to try and process the experience.
Expressive writing has proved itself to be a dynamic way to do that.

[letric]

Some of it comes in the form of advice or exhortations to self-development or knowledge,
some of it is testimonies from people whose experience has given their stories emotional
resonance and weight. I was moved by The Help, Kathryn Stockett's affecting best seller
novel on civil rights in the southern States in the 1960s, reading Rebecca Skloot's The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was even more powerful. The real life and death of the
black woman at its centre - whose cells were used to research without the family
permission - wasn't imaginary. Reading about it brought home more than anything what
it meant to be poor and black in the US in the mid-twentieth century.

[letric]

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. We are bombarded today with such a quantity
of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds
on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces like a rubbish dump. of course, there are
many ways to look at everything.

[letric]

So while we continue celebrate words of writers such as Confucius, William Shakespeare, and John Milton,
we must also salute words of modern writers from Derek Walcott tlo James Joyce, Ted Hughes to Nelson
Mandela, Seamus Heaney to Michael Ondaatje and Maya Angelou to James Kelman.

[letric]

Challenging
edited by John Freeman

Where do we go when we've nowhere left to run? How do our minds forge plans or fantasies of escape?
These stories courageously confront in very different ways the challenge of making major transitions in
life. Watching loved ones die, surviving heartbreak, retaining our humanity in wartime. There is much t
o think about reading this book, about identity, loss and the the courage to move on.

[letric]

Politically Incorrect: Words of mass deception
exposed by
Michell O'Regan

If you have been "surplused" by your company you may not be able to afford a coronet of environmentally-friendly "Rain Forest Crunch" ice cream, but do not despair, for after some "rightsizing" the managers may decide to "upstaff" and you could be able to "boomerang" back into a job. This handy guide to the language of the modern world is both informative (would you know how to reply to the question "QPSA") also satirical, with sections on "Job ads decoded". Particularly fascinating is a feature on politically correct ways of describing both men and women and what they really mean, for instance "ego-abundant" (self-centred) and "He is not having a middle life crisis, he is assessing his chronological options." Modern paraphrase of proverbs and well-knownsayings include, "Scintillate, scintillate asteroids minific", while on a more serious level, an analysis of techniques of persuasion exposes the ways politicians and ad-men manipulate their audiences.