it is communication

Last night I watch Lars and the Real Girl. For those of you who have not watched this film I highly recommend it and encourage you to run and pick it up to watch with dinner tonight. Much of this movie dealt with communication or lack there of in our daily lives and how we can be affected by it. It made me think of how often we have communication errors with loved one and we don't realize that the error has been made and it could be years later when we realize how that small misstep altered our future. Something like 90% or more off all communication is body language, inflection, tone and expression. Here lately though there is less and less verbal communication with e-mail and texting and fax and typed letter. So it begs the question are we communicating properly if the reader is only able to grasp 10% of what we are trying to say? The Oxford English Dictionary says that there are approximately 250,000 words in the English language and about 20% of those words are not in use. That mean while we are using so much of the written word in current communication we are not using approximately 50,000 available words to get our point across. On late night TV last night they were making a spoof about Merriam-Webster Dictionary changing proper use of words, ie; the word literally is now to be expressly used in any context except when something is literal. Example my head literally exploded with information. Funny but true unfortunately. There are so many words that we use that mean entirely different things than the context that we are using them. Take awful for example. Awful technically means full of awe, awe is something inspiring, large, magnificent yet we use it as something that is horrid, wretched, disgusting (ie; That egg smells awful). The word extraordinary if taken apart means exceptionally plain yet we use it as something exceptionally out of the ordinary. I guess what I am attempting to convey is this, watch what you say, type, express or write. Understanding communication amongst ourselves is every important and we should not take it forgranted, we should not be lazy in our speech and we should use as much of the human language as we possibly can and as properly as possible.