Words…revelations and veils, searchlights and disguises…We hide behind them, and we use them as lanterns to search a way around the pitfalls set out by challengers – and insincere ‘friends’. We wield them as swords to attack our enemies and as shields to fend off assaults from foes. We place them as barriers against the rest of a possibly hostile world.

Sadly, we sometimes marshal our verbal skills in order to wrongfully blame others as we seek to undermine and exact revenge on former friends or lovers. These are words that can serve a dual purpose. They may act as salve to soothe the pain of our inner hurts, and, simultaneously, as a caustic to sear one-time comrades or admirers who have fallen out of favor.

Sometimes, we are so enraptured by the lovely symmetry of our logic and blinded by the blazing fire and beauty of our own rhetoric that we fail to see its essential vacuity. Nor do we detect the cleverly concealed verbal trap beneath the gentle flow of our opponent’s responses.

At times, we also trip over our busily wagging tongues and fall into a trap of our own making.

Occasionally, the very words we carefully design as camouflage for our real intent inadvertently open a window to our innermost thoughts. We suddenly find ourselves embarrassingly naked with the shades up.

And let’s not forget the flattering accolades. Are those warmly spoken phrases well and truly meant or are they just a feint to reposition our attention away from our opponent’s Machiavellian, self-serving objective?

We marshal squads of words of our own and send them out on patrol through the shadows and thickets of new encounters to probe and divine the true intent of fresh acquaintances. Will they be comrades or adversaries?

Are these just the disillusioned, meandering musings of a former idealist grown cynical with age, or the practical view of one who has learned the truth in the adage, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean somebody ain’t out to get you.”

© Thurman P. Woodfork

15 December 2008