Worth your time.

Recently I was driving through Los Angeles, and suddenly I had the strange sensation of driving through a huge dictionary. Wherever I looked there were words trying to take my eyes from the road. They said, "Use me, take me, buy me, drink me, smell me, touche me, kiss me, sleep with me." In such a world who can maintain respect for words?

All this is to suggest that words, my own included, have lost their creative power. Their limitless multiplication has made us lose confidence in words and caused us to think, more often than not, "They are just words."

Teachers speak to students for six, twelve, eighteen and sometimes twenty four years. But the students often emerge from the experience with the feeling, "They were just words." Preachers preach their sermons week after week and year after year. But their parishioners remain the same and often think, "They are just words." Politicians, businessmen, ayatollahs, and popes give speeches and make statements "in season and out of season," but those who listen say: "They are just words... just another distraction."

The result of this is that the main function of the word, which is communication, is no longer realized.

- the words of Henri Nouwen found here