Whatever language you happen to speak, words are a blessing and a curse.

Humans have a brain that uses an operating system based on words. Most people do not think in ones and zeros although surely some do. But even they are converting code into words and thought.

So how could words be curse? Surely, they are a great liberation for the mind whether in the arts or sciences? Well, the odd thing about words is that they are constructed using an alphabet of not very many letters around 25 depending on your language. The Arabic abjad for instance uses 28 letters and the Hebrew alphabet, 22. The creative brilliance of an alphabet-based language comes from the astronomical permutations derived from such a relatively small number of letters.

This almost infinite number of permutations to create words is the blessing they give to language. The curse is that human thoughts only use a small fraction of these permutations because their thoughts are limited. Let us hold that idea of ‘limited thinking’ and examine how easy it is to create new words, and I shall use English as an example but no doubt the same principle applies in other Indo-European languages.

Take a simple combination of three letters…ONE and how it is used to make a variety of four-letter words in English.

I shall suffix each letter of the alphabet (less vowels) in this experiment.

B…bone

C…cone

D…done

So far so good. These three are common words, but next comes a word that has no meaning.

f…fone

to continue…

g…gone

h…hone

j…jone

k…kone

l…lone

m…mone

n…none

p…pone

q…qone

v…vone

s…sone

t…tone

v…vone

w…wone

x…xone

y…yone

z…zone

Out of these total of 22 examples only 9 have established meanings! There are 13 simple new four-letter words waiting for a meaning to be attached to them!

From this simple exercise we can extrapolate the entire English Dictionary as being a fraction of the total available words in English or any other Indo-European language.

From this we can see that language does not limit our thoughts. There are plenty of words. What we are short of are meanings to attach to words.

The curse of language is then an expression of how languages control and limit our thoughts. They create boundaries over which only creative writers and in particular poets, create new meanings. But if you make no sense then it is assumed, your mind has gone.

As the boundaries for new words are almost infinite, true limitation is the direction in which our thoughts extend.

We are like trees clinging to a rock with our roots. To remain upright we must limit our grasp on reality…we must not ‘go too far’.

This is the curse of language. The structure which enables mental exploration is also a limitation of thought.

The mind of newborn child has no such limitation through language. It must learn a thousand new things every day for months, even years before it begins to understand the meanings of words. Interestingly, an infant’s brain can learn any human language, however obscure it may be.

Our brain cells and their almost infinite connections are not a limiting factor to thought but only become so through life.

If a person is not adventurous in their thoughts, they can calcify and express no more than the same ideas repeatedly. Perhaps you know some people like that. A common term for them is a ‘bore’.

There are indeed, in the words of the old aphorism, ‘no dull subjects only dull minds.’

Do you feel like a qone?