I have recently been thinking about the power words have. Many years ago someone told me that if you use a word like war zone to describe a situation and the situation wasn't a war zone just by naming it one, it becomes one in your thinking. The effect of this can be rather depressing and self-defeating.
Being a lover of hyperbole and finding it funny to blow a situation out of proportion I realised I did this a lot. But I could see how negative that habit could be so from that time on I was careful to use words to accurately describe what was going on.
However, in the last few months I have noticed that I have again started to use words that exaggerate how serious a situation is. Disaster became one word I used frequently. It actually became a source of entertainment to me to call a situation a disaster. If I couldn't get hold of someone it was a disaster. If I ran out of coffee it was a disaster. I went from one disaster to the next.
Then people in my sphere of influence started to do the same thing. And suddenly we were all experiencing cataclysmic events on a regular basis.
At some point I realised it wasn't helpful to call a situation a disaster even if it was funny to do so. So I stopped doing it. But the people around me are still calling situations a disaster.
And I have to confess I find it a little depressing when they do so. It no longer seems funny. The power of words, eh?
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