25/08/25

They say music begins where words end. That painting captures what language cannot. That dance, or silence, or sound holds what the human tongue is too clumsy to shape. But listen closely to that idea and you’ll hear it collapsing under its own weight. Words have never failed us. It is we who fail them. We are too careless with them, too lazy to seek the right ones, too quick to retreat into clichés when the soil runs deep and difficult. To blame language for our lack of imagination is like blaming a piano for the player’s hesitation. The keys are there. The music is waiting.

Think about it: the sentence music speaks when words cannot is, itself, words. You only understand what music is meant to express because someone taught you in language what it is you are hearing. Before you could ever be moved by a song, you were moved by a story, by a description, by a name for what your heart was feeling. Without words, we wouldn’t even know what “beyond words” means.

This is the quiet power of language - it undergirds every other artform. A melody might stir something in you, but what do you do afterward? You reach for words. You say it felt like falling or it reminded me of her or it sounded like grief in the shape of a river. The music needs words to echo it, to capture it, to share it. Otherwise, it dies as soon as it’s heard.

People underestimate words because they are so ordinary. They slip from our mouths every hour without fanfare. They scrawl across text messages, captions, comments, essays. And because they’re everywhere, we treat them like they’re cheap. But the truth is the opposite: words are a currency more valuable than gold. They buy trust, love, fear, loyalty, rage. Wars have begun because of them. Empires have fallen at the strike of a phrase. Revolutions were ignited not by songs or paintings but by declarations written down, by voices raised and spoken.

If music is fire, then words are the spark. If art is the storm, then words are the wind that steers it. They don’t follow behind other mediums, limping along after beauty has already been expressed. They stand at the front. They lead.

Of course, music and art have a unique way of reaching us. They bypass analysis, weaving straight through the body, into the chest and the bloodstream. A chord can feel like heartbreak. A color can stop your breath. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that bypass makes them superior. Because words can do both. They can move straight into the soul, and they can explain why. They can crash over us like thunder and they can quietly dissect the storm, naming every cloud.

Try to put grief into words and you’ll see what I mean. People often say grief is beyond description, but it isn’t. It’s just that describing it hurts. And so we cop out with silence or song, telling ourselves words aren’t enough. Yet the truth is, words can say my chest feels hollow, like a room stripped bare of furniture. They can say it is like drowning in air, like waking up in the middle of the night to find the world colder than you remember. They can say I miss them - three simple words, heavier than iron. Tell me words fail. No - they bleed, they ache, they endure.

Or take joy. Music may burst with joy. Art may glow with it. But words can unwrap it. They can peel back its layers so that we see joy not just as a feeling but as a moment, a collection of details: the way sunlight slipped through the blinds, the sound of laughter that broke into snorts, the sticky sweetness of mango juice running down your wrist. You don’t just feel joy again - you remember it, see it, taste it. Words are the time machine. Words are the anchor.

The beauty of language is that it adapts. A melody stays the same whether played for a child or an old man, in times of peace or times of war. But words can shift. They can be sharpened into arguments, softened into comfort, twisted into satire, stretched into poetry. A single story can be told to a five-year-old as a fairy tale and retold to a philosopher as an allegory. Language bends, transforms, becomes exactly what the moment demands.

And perhaps the greatest proof that words are art is their ability to change form without losing soul. No painting shifts its colors depending on who stands before it. No song rearranges its chords for the heart that listens. But words can. They bend, stretch, transform - not just over centuries but in every conversation, in every exchange between two human beings.

A phrase to a child is a story. To a scholar it is an argument. To the grieving it is a comfort. To the angry it is a spark. The art is not only in the words chosen but in the instinct of the speaker to shape them for the ear that hears. That is craft. That is performance. That is skill.

We all know this instinctively. You don’t speak to your grandmother the way you speak to your closest friend. You do not write a letter of protest the way you write a love note. Words are chosen like colors on a palette - not all at once, not at random, but with care for the picture you are trying to paint for a particular eye. And the same word can shimmer with entirely different shades depending on who receives it. “Home” means one thing to the refugee, another to the exile, another still to the child who has never left it. To navigate those differences is not science. It is art.

That adaptability is not a weakness of words but their greatest strength. Music is universal in sound, yes, but vague in meaning. Words are the opposite: they require attention, detail, audience. They force you to reckon with who you are speaking to and what will pierce through their walls. A sentence crafted for one person may be meaningless for another, but to adjust, to craft again, to mold - that is artistry in motion.

Language, then, is not static. It is living. It evolves with culture, shifts with generations, reshapes itself with every new voice. Slang is born and dies. Old words lose their sharpness and new ones arrive, glowing with possibility. And each time you speak, you are painting with that living palette - deciding which hues to keep, which ones to discard, which combinations will reveal something true to the one listening.

This is why words are never finished. A painting is hung. A song is recorded. But words? They never stop moving. They flow from tongue to tongue, from age to age, from story to story. Each use is a remix, each phrase is a reinterpretation, each sentence is a performance for this moment and this person. That ceaseless change is what makes language not just communication but art.

To master words, then, is not merely to know definitions or grammar. It is to know people. To know how to carry your thought into another’s mind in a way that lands, not just in logic but in feeling. That requires empathy, creativity, and craft - the very qualities that make great artists.

So let no one say words fail. They live. They adapt. They breathe with us. They may not always be easy, but that is because art never is.

People love to say the English language is too limited. That it doesn’t have enough words, that it can’t capture the full spectrum of thought and feeling. And yes, it has its limits. There are words in other tongues for shades of emotion we can only circle around in English. But that isn’t a weakness. It’s a challenge – and a beautiful one.

Because limitation is what fuels creativity. A poet doesn’t have infinite tools. They work within boundaries, and it is the pushing against those boundaries that makes their craft sing. To say English is limited is only to admit that it requires imagination – to stack words in ways that stretch their meaning, to invent metaphor, to reshape old phrases into something new. The gaps in the language aren’t failures; they’re invitations. They force us to dance with words, not just recite them.

What greater art could there be than to say something profound with the simplest palette? To writing entire worlds out of twenty-six letters? If that is a limitation, then it is the very limitation that makes language art. 

Max Jeganathan writes in his book “The Freedom Trap” that autonomy is not freedom, that true freedom comes not from limitless choice but from the right boundaries – the kind that help us flourish. Think of a fish and a fishbowl. Autonomy would be to grab the fish, take it out of the bowl and drop it on the floor. It’s free to go wherever it pleases. But soon, it will die. It’s not free. However, within the “constraints” of the fishbowl, the water and the food provided, the fish can live a full, flourishing life. The same is true of language. Its limits are not chains but guides. They give shape to what we say, forcing us to wrestle, to choose, to create with care. A language with no boundaries would be chaos – endless sound without meaning. But a language with boundaries becomes art, because within those borders we are free to play, invent, and stretch expression to its edges.

It is the very fact that English cannot do everything that makes it beautiful when it does. The challenge sharpens the artist. The limitation refines the thought. Words flourish not in spite of their boundaries but because of them.