I was scanning through the channels on my digital cable and as I passed over the Bravo channel they had a montage commercial including the interviewer from “Inside the Actor’s Studio” or whatever it is (James something) and he asked some celebrity “What is your favorite word?” and it got me thinking.
As you can tell from the title, I didn’t settle on just one. I actually have two favorite words: language and compassion.
Language - this word encompasses so much. The spoken word alone has thousands of dialects which speakers around the world share. The grammar can change drastically (left to right/right to left, verb order, and so much more), the spelling of words and their very syllabic nature and inflection can dramatically alter yet the human mind interprets, comprehends, and assembles so many sentences as we communicate with one another. Not to mention the plethora of computing languages, which I of course have a passion for. They can describe page layouts on the Web, provide server backends and dynamic generation, create clients and complex applications, all with unique syntax and style, yet sharing a core commonality as all languages do. All in the aid of communication and expression.
Compassion - I found how much this word resonated in college during a conversation with a friend. She told me that friendship was about compassion and when I asked her to explain she said to look at the etymology of the word - it literally mean “to suffer with.” That was so profound, and true, that knew it was an incredible word. Compassion represents what we strive to achieve with those we care about, to suffer with them and help reduce the load by sharing the burden. Empathetic understanding encapsulated in a single concise word.
