Wordle's startling revelations

While I was going to write about something entirely different today, I couldn’t pass this up. Today a friend sent me a link of what he made while playing around with an online app called Wordle. You put in whatever words you want and it makes digital “art” out of them. Above was what created for me when I pasted the “About me” section from my Facebook.

If you have ever seen this section, it is written in paragraph form, so I assumed it wouldn’t work well for something like this, but I wanted to see what happened anyway. I am pretty astounded by the results. Not only does this seem to work well as an interesting representation of my thoughts, it also adds and entirely new dimension.

Look at some of the words it listed. “Hold” is a great example. I wrote that, “An opera can hold just as much joy for me as a comic book.” In that sentence, hold has no significance. It is there to help me get to the point that I like opera and comic books, and to show my diversity. In that sentence, hold is a means to an end. In this picture, it is an end unto itself, and suddenly many more meanings can stem from it. When I looked at it, I thought of my joy at holding on to someone else. Thinking about it more, you can think of how one hold’s their life in their own hands, how sometimes we hold on to another’s heart. Holding on to what we hold dear. All of these thoughts stemming from one simple word, allowing me to see myself in that word, no longer as a bridge in a sentence, but as meaning itself.

How amazing language is that a simple word can have so much meaning. How “debate” can go from a subject I coached to the fact that I like to debate nearly everyone in the world around me. “Close” can go from “Being close to someone I care about” to bringing up images of how many aspects of my life are close to what I am striving for. How close I have come to some goals, and times in my life that I was so close to losing what I hold dear.

I may have never thought to include these things when thinking about myself or my life, nor would I have included them in something like an “about me” section, but the fact remains that they a part of who I am, and apparently right there below the surface, if I only had looked.

I won’t belabor the point or go n examining every word here, but suffice to say that sometimes the power of language is truly amazing, and it is great in these moments where we can look at ourselves and see things we didn’t even realize were right on the surface.