You think baked potatoes are loaded.
And they are. Can be.
Chives. Cheese. Sour cream. Bacon bits.
But words, oh my god, words.
Words are loaded.
Every word full of itself and much more.
Words come into our mouths
dragging the soiled roots of family trees,
grandparents, great all the way back,
recognizable parents, known siblings,
(some almost identical twins),
aunts, uncles, cousins enough to fill
an etymological dictionary or the OED.
Ancestors too long gone to remember,
the genes of their genius still sound.
Nouns verved to verbs.
Verbs crystalized to nouns.
So much we say we don’t
know how much we said.
The shadowed squirrel, for instance,
or a boys locker room full of orchids.
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Every word you speak or write brims with what you don’t know.
I don’t know either. But when I’m curious, I look it up.
Language is a robust tool for meaning-making.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary