Day 33: On Words

If you repeat a word again and again, it loses it's meaning.
heartbreak. heartbreak? is that spelled right? Heartbreak. AUGH.
A Softer World

I stumbled upon this webcomic while on plurk just now. Someone posted a link to a different posting by this website, and I happened to peruse through the archives until I came across this particular gem.

It reminds me of something we used to do in my journalism class in high school. Those of us who designed pages and covered the whole layout aspect of publishing the school paper often found ourselves searching for an appropriate font to help tell the story. This wasn't always the case, because we were taught well that too many novelty fonts are a bad thing.

Personally I still cringe when I see more than three fonts on a flyer or poster without a very good visual context to put them in. But anyways, when we did do this, we would highlight the text, and then click in Adobe InDesign's font bar and scroll through all the fonts one at a time, only pausing long enough to see if it matched the story we were trying to tell.

After about the twentieth font, the word or name (names were especially bad) we were looking at would start to blur together. And even those of us who'd been designing for years would start to question and second guess. That word can't be spelled right. It looks wrong. AAAgggghhhh!

And then there would be heads pounding against walls as the rest of us rushed in to save the poor designer from the offending word and to have them check it online and in their notes.

Okay, so I hyperbolized that last detail, but you get my point, something about seeing the same word over and over in so many ways without changing anything more than how it looked made it start to look wrong. The word began to lose meaning, and with that, all semblance of being a real word.

So I ask, what makes a word? What gives it meaning and provides the thought behind it? When it comes down to it, print is just smudges of ink on paper (or in the case of this blog post, pixels on the screen). There must be some social aspect that binds the idea to the word. Otherwise when we see a word over and over, or say it over and over like in the webcomic I started with, it wouldn't lose it's meaning.

I'm hoping to start a dialogue with this, so please feel free to comment. I'd prefer if you did so at my blog, and not on Facebook, but I welcome whatever feedback I can get.