Le mot juste...

The perfect word.
The eternal quest of Flaubert. The antithesis to foot in mouth.
The logic behind 'Eureka'. The courage behind 'Molon labe'.
The thought behind 'Neti Neti'.

This phrase just struck me. You know, sometimes, words strike you like that. They haunt you, never leaving your imagination or memory. They grip your mind, and persuade you to think. It needn't be universal - your reaction that is, for any couplet or adage or quote - that is something very relative. Something like the fact that you don't always like a commercially successful movie and also that you almost never end up liking the Oscar winner for the year. But one fact is certain (came to think of it, isn't every fact certain?!) - A written word communicates so much more than what it was initially intended to. Under every pair of eyes it comes, it assumes different, contextual meanings which may depend upon the background - both social & personal - and also the foreground, of the reader; a process which may visually be like shape formation in a kaleidoscope - a different shape for each turn, and it may end up creating a most personal note for individuals. For instance, I like the word 'Intense' since my earliest association with language. If you ask me for reasons, well, I dont have any. Probably its because of a longtime fascination with intense, broodish personalities. Or probably because a flame is intense, and I happen to love flames. Or maybe just because it is such a hard hitting, deep and, well, intense word!
Words - these groupings of letters, brought together to supposedly convey a meaning - this meaning been suggested by our neanderthal forefathers, who obviously shied away from any traces of non-phonetic logic while suggesting the same - are such a bizarre, yet interesting lot. This very invention of man, this written/spoken script, comes around to challenge & dominate the man and and his mind from time to time. We have been governed by Geeta & Kuraan, incensed by speeches, enraptured by poetry, moved by tragedies, enamoured by songs, educated by books, inspired by anthems & swayed by slogans. Forget about the proposed takeover of human race by 'AI'ed robots, we are already ruled by one of our most antiquated creations - Words. Any human interaction with the world outside the limits of his body requires communication, and any reliable communication system which may be an 'All Terrain' deployable one, and which does not rest on the foundation of a structurally word-oriented language, is still a distant dream. I'm able to type this because I'm interacting with a keyboard that is modeled on English and you are able to read this because, obviously, you know English. We can dial phone numbers because we know the numeric text. We can speak because we know the spoken language. We can make computer programs which serve us because we know the programming language & the processor knows how to understand it. In short, in our every interaction with anyone or anything except ourselves, we employ words. Even symbols, when used in communicating thoughts, are modeled on a language - with each symbol effectively conveying a sentence or a word in that language; Yes, even for the deaf & the mutes, who have never spoken or heard anything in their lives - let alone a language. Forms of communications which delve into realms beyond language too are said to exist, with notable examples being parapsychology, but our current knowledge is too frivolous for them to be taken seriously as communication facilitators, Uri Geller notwithstanding! So, the way it turns out to be is that we would have been nothing but a bunch of nomadic beasts, groping in the dark and searching for ways to organize, store, pass & utilize information, had it not been for language. Even an alien civilization - in order to put up an utterly unavoidable communication channel - would need a set of symbols, governed by a common rule so as to convey the same meaning to its inhabitants whenever a particular use of the symbols is made in a particular order - and yup, that is precisely what we call as language!
But words do not merely fulfill the role of communication facilitators, though they remain to serve this very purpose for a vast majority of us. They become an expression of self when coming from the honest, an expression of a dream when coming from the poet, an expression of reality when coming from the grounded, an expression of passion when coming from the incensed & an expression of hope when coming from a believer. Then, in these situations, they rise above their literal meanings. They translate into something that is free, that is unbounded; something that is quite ironically free from restrictions posed by the very language that helped it materialize in the first place.
Ever read a Param Vir Chakra plaque? You will know that something if you did!