La Voz de Galicia – 25 de xaneiro, 2026 →
It’s curious how there are words that take on a different meaning at different moments. How the same word can, all of a sudden, carry a completely different weight than it did yesterday, or a minute ago. I’m not talking about the definition of the word itself, but about the meaning each of us gives to that word at any given time. Take, for example, the words death, cancer, funeral, grief. If, at this very moment, any of us has one of those words close by (a loved one who dies, a loved one diagnosed with a serious illness), then the definition and the meaning of those words suddenly become loaded with the full weight of the world, with the weight of our pain, our worry. And for a while, perhaps, we won’t be able to read or say those words without relating them to that loved one, to that pain.
Our inner language is something difficult to express; within each word, an entire universe can reside. And although everyday we often say thousands of words, many of them in passing (“Hi, how are you?”), the truth is that in our inner world, words are not always capable of representing everything we feel.
This week I reread a 2019 article by my colleague at the university, the neuroscientist Kenneth S. Kosik, about the distance between our experience and the words we have to express it, about how language fails us. And although I’ve read it several times since it was published (we use it in class), this time I found myself stuck on this quote by the writer David Foster Wallace: “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” I kept asking myself whether we are “just words,” and if so, what or who is it that gives us meaning…
