Can words waylay you?
- By Superadministrator
- Fri,24 Sep 2021
ATTENTION! BE ALERT! The next time you read an advertisement or article, these words should beep in your mind. You should be on the lookout. What for, you ask? Read on! Words...what is their purpose? Essentially to communicate your thoughts and ideas and share information effectively. But...is that it? No indeed. Words in place of signs or symbols can produce a whole lot of emotions and have a much larger impact on you mentally. Words waylay you, sometimes very dangerously. They are woven in sentences in a way that it becomes hard for you to understand what really the message is. They can be a weapon used on you, dangerous and fearful. By whom, you ask? The zillions of companies who are competing with each other to make YOU buy their products— they hire professionals to persuade their customers to buy or use a certain product or service. And this might not seem very dangerous. But imagine yourself in a situation where about a thousand voices are pounding in your head, asking for your attention. It isn't very imaginary, is it? It is today's reality where at every corner, every swipe or scroll on your phone, you find yourself surrounded by the possiblity of buying a product or service that might impress others or dignify your image without actually being really useful. Am I making words sound like they are AK-47s? In the present time and place, they might not look very dangerous. I mean, buying a few more things than needed and cluttering your house unnecessarily isn't dangerous exactly, is it? But a befitting example where words were as persuasive as guns, maybe even more, was the Nazi Germany. Now, I'm judging, you know who Hitler is. The Nazi propaganda very smartly used deceptive words to cover the crimes of the Nazis while gathering popular support from the Nordic Aryans who might otherwise have considered the same things to be atrocious and inhuman. Another example, though fictional, is the imaginary, dystopian world of '1984', an epoch-making novel by George Orwell. It presented the idea of the result of a very frightful use of words where thoughts of the common people were highly manipulated. In fact, the past itself was changed according to the present so that even historical information wasn't found to be reliable. One could survive only if they spoke in favour of the government and its policies. Not even in the seclusion of one's own room could a person speak freely. If the government said two and two make five, you would have to agree with that and erase the memory of two and two making four. There won't be any proof in history either to support that two and two make four. The truth itself wouldn't be true, so misleading and horrifying and false was the story of 1984. Words are this dangerous that they can meddle with your basic understandings and ideas. They can deviate you from what you know is right and make you instead follow what you think is right. Now, it needs to be understood that not all pieces of writing or advertisement are misleading. But you also need to be alert while reading anything. Think and then, act. Don't fall in a trap. Otherwise, words will waylay you. Written by: Yashvi Dhadda, X B