Listening for History

A few days ago, I went to a local convenience store to buy ice cream. While I was paying, I noticed that, when the cash register drawer was opened, a little speaker on the machine made the sound of an old-fashioned cash register drawer, with a bell and everything. This struck me as funny and [...]

Potent Words: Need Versus Want

How many times have you gone to the grocery store and, as you’re walking down the aisles and picking things off the shelves, said, “Oh, I need that”? If you’ve got kids, how many times have they held up some goody or other in your grocery excursion and declared, “We need more of these, Mom”?
Chances [...]

Potent Words: Surviving Versus Living

If you’re “making a living,” that’s a good thing, right? The bills (mostly) get paid on time, there’s food on the table, warm clothes for winter and a roof overhead. Maybe there are good schools for the kids and good health care for grandparents.
But what if you hate your job, are unhappy with the person [...]

Potent Words: Pity Versus Compassion

Language is powerful. It is the trait that sets us apart from other animals, although there are other species who you could say have some form of “language” (dolphins and whales, for instance). The distinction between those other species and us, though, is that we humans seem to have countless ways of expressing abstract concepts, [...]