Words of Warning
We have so many words for different aspects of our lives: Soothing words, of regret, those of warning, and the list goes on. The reason that I have come to this post is because I needed some words of sympathy. Condolences really, as a co-worker lost someone close to them, and I am not very close to that co-worker. He is nice enough to me, but he can be a real bear if you get in his way.
There are plenty of ways I could have phrased the card but most of them were either: a) too personal (as if I were writing to a friend or relative) or b) too fake. So I decided to google some soothing words.
When I typed in: “words of,” the first suggestion was warning. This was followed with:
- words of encouragement;
- A nice contrast to warning don’t you think
- words of sympathy;
- Ah, here we go
- words of affirmation;
- Notice we are getting into a trend here
- words of urgency;
- Alright, we can scratch that
- words of wisdom.
- I guess we save the best for last
The reason behind the post is this; Do we really need so many words of warning? That seems to be a little extreme. Yes, I understand that this is a phrase we use. The phrase itself is the warning.
One would say: “A word of warning.” If, for example you begin spelling out the dangers then it is no longer a word. Thus you are stating a specific danger that needs to be addressed. I guess one could list them all, how many do we have after all? But then that seems counter productive since we have a general warning already usually followed up with a quick synopsis.
To conclude I find it interesting that we as a country are first and foremost interested in those words of warning.