Four letter words

OK, come on, I know what you were thinking (don't even try to lie about it!) but that is not what I meant.  I have plenty to say about profanity, vulgarity, and cursing, but that will have to wait.

No, I'm talking about a very, very common word that I bet nearly every English speaker uses, a word which has just four letters, and yet it speaks volumes.  It speaks encyclopedias of meaning.

Go ahead, guess what word I am talking about.  Really.  Guess.  It only takes a second.

Did you guess mpwf?  Every letter shifted left one letter.  And no, I DON'T mean nwxg - I said to shift left, not right.

That is a good guess, and probably a great guess, and it actually does fit my hints, but it is just not it.  No, there have already been tons and tons written about that, and I'll save my comments on that topic for another post.

Here is another hint - I have used the word at least twice already in this post.  Does that help?

No more teasing then, my word is kvtu.  Shift left.

In my experience, that word  (I'll refer to it as TW from now on) has incredible power to change discussions in ways that are usually not obvious unless you look out for it.

Let us imagine that one is trying to clean out one's garage, a chore which one has told one's spouse that one would do last weekend, but one began and soon stopped because, say, one had too many bikes left over from kids and whatnot that are cluttering up the place, and one tried to think up the best solution to that problem.

So the conversation between one and one's spouse goes as follow:

S:  I thought you said you'd clean out the garage last weekend.
O: I know, but I got started on it and then I didn't know what to do with the bikes, and . . .
S:  Why didn't you just take care of it?
O: I was trying to figure out where to put them all . . .
S:  Why didn't you just mount them on the wall like we talked about last summer?

Did you notice TW?  What does this word mean when used in the above phrases?  What is this word saying, actually?  This word is saying "You are trying to give some complicated explanation for not doing something that is so easy and so trivial that it is not even worth bringing up."  This word reminds me of two sayings I have heard, one from my high school football coach, and one from a counselor I once had.  My football coach would say, when you tried to explain why you didn't accomplish what he wanted you to, "No excuses, just results!"   A counselor told me that was a common trait among humans.  "Nobody wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby."

So look out when someone uses TW when talking to you.

Now, there isn't much you can really do about the words someone else uses, but there is an even worse use of TW that you can actually do a LOT about.

Listen to see if you ever use that word.  I don't mean when talking to someone else, although it would be nice if you stopped doing that to other people, even though they won't really notice it and thank you for it, but they will probably have a general feeling that you are less obnoxious than you might have been.

No, I mean if you are describing to someone else something which you have done, something you have accomplished, try to NEVER use TW.  I learned this in an acting class, and someday I'll talk about acting, which I really really like, and which is full of a lot of BAD advice but also some really good advice if you meet the right people.

This is some of the good advice - if someone actually does want to hear about what you have done then leave out TW.   For example, let us say someone visits and notices the new colors you have painted in your living room.  They'll say something like "Hey, nice colors here" (unless they are jerks and then why on earth did you invite them into your house?) and if you say "Oh, I just picked out some colors and painted" it sounds like that was a trivial thing to do, as if one was saying "Oh, I just turned on the tap and out came the water" when the truth is there was more to it than that, probably a lot more to it.  You probably took some time to consider what would look best, you took the time to pick out the best paint, and then you took some time to convince your spouse he needed to paint the living room even though he just painted it last year.

So you did not "just picked out some colors and painted."  You 'picked out some colors and painted," which is an accomplishment, and you deserve credit for that, even if by 'painted' you mean "convinced my spouse to paint and had to put up with all his grumblings."

Take credit for what you have done!