Apparel maketh a man and words a speaker or writer.
As one selects the apparel for an occasion, he selects the words also to suit his speech or script.
The spoken word has more power and often a telling effect.
When President Elect Obama spoke in Chicago and said, "Yes we can," the whole of the USA reverberated with those words.
Millions of Afro Americans cried with happiness and hope.
The rest of the world admired his oratory and listened to him mesmerized.
His three words, "Yes we can," became a catch phrase and signified hope and change of the existing world order.
It is no hyperbole to say those words electrified the whole world.
Above all, his speech showed the power of the spoken word.
Modern history began with the French Revolution, which introduced the concepts of "Equality, Liberty and Fraternity.
" These concepts live even today and guide several nations and millions of people.
Karl Marx's clarion call to the proletariat, "Labourers of the world unite.
You have nothing to lose but your chains," had ushered in a radical revolution which divided the world into two blocks and brought in the cold war.
Communism, later, proved to be a god that failed, but that is not germane to the point.
Sir Winston Churchill used more words, but he too inspired his nation to victory by saying, "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
" Mahatma Gandhi secured freedom from the obdurate British by two operative words, Ahimsa (nonviolence) and noncooperation.
Martin Luther King preached, "We shall overcome.
" Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the edifice of Communism with two words: perestroika and glasnost.
The movie King's Speech, which left everyone speechless and bagged many Oscars, proved the value of the spoken word and good diction.
Just as they can inspire people, words have the power of a sharp scythe to kill and the weight of a fender's ball to fell a person or a group of people.
Words also can charm and melt people.
Everyone warms up to a kind word spoken, and only few do not fall for flattery.
Gifted people speak with candy in their mouth and say the right word at the right time.
This art, now called "practical intelligence," helps the speaker immensely in inter-personal relations.
People endowed with such sweet tongues succeed in all walks of life.
President Obama's oratory and his communication skills in speech and writing helped him immensely in his victory to the White House.
While selecting the right dress from a closet or walk in wardrobe, some clothes may fall accidentally.
So do words.
When an expensive item of attire falls, we stoop to pick up and restore it to its original place.
We have a similar option with the written word, thanks to cut and paste methods.
Unfortunately, it is not so with the spoken word.
We can not undo the irreparable damage the offending word causes just as we can not unring a bell.
Expressions of regret, sometimes, act like a balm and soothe the feelings of the affected party, but the damage can not be controlled fully as the offending word will remain in the labyrinth of memory and may surface later.
We often see the politicians put their foot in the mouth, make insensitive remarks and later deny what they said, or claim they had been misquoted.
Most of them lose their credibility once and for all.
We, at times, come across loose cannons who hold forth on subjects, which they know little of, and start unholy controversies.
We iron clothes to make them wrinkle free and add a spray of starch if required.
If that is not smart enough, we send them to the cleaners.
New words like speech impaired, hearing impaired and differently abled, which are politically correct, are like clothes back from the cleaners and used to ensure the sensibilities of any group, community or sex are not hurt.
Hitherto, we used to write his/her to avoid gender bias.
Now his is an acceptable form for both sexes.
We enjoy shopping for new clothes and like to pick dresses in fashion.
Like rapidly changing fashions, words also change with times.
Words such as macho, once in vogue, have given way to metro-sexual and now retro-sexual.
What their avatar will be after a few years is anybody's guess.
Designer clothes are the in thing today.
The writers coin new words at regular intervals.
Recently, a writer has started what he termed as Existential Language, which uses pragmatist's vocabulary.
To help the uninitiated, he is also developing a freaktionary.
To illustrate that truth has different connotations, all quasi truths, he has coined new terms like bluth, fruth, sweeth, pruth, quth and vuth.
To mention one, bluth according to him is a quasi truth which lives on.
It is best illustrated by a statement of the Republican Party that President Obama's visit to India cost $200million, an imaginary figure.
Most of the Republicans, it seems, admitted it was false, but the story didn't die.
The Democrats or the White House didn't give a correct figure either.
This made people angry, although the statement was only a quasi truth.
It is pertinent to quote Churchill again.
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
" Taking the analogy between words and women, the old curvaceous women morphed into women with lean looks and zero size dresses, who, in turn, are giving way to "bootylicious" ladies.
How these ladies look and what names will be invented for them in years to come depends on one's imagination.
Incidentally, the days of High Tech brought new categories of people: "cilleterate"-computer illiterates and "celliterate"-not savvy about cell phones.
As new gizmos come into the market, new words are likely to enrich the vocabulary.
Some dresses look flashy and gaudy.
Some people prefer these dresses either to show off their feel good factor or their oomph.
Writers put pizzazz in their writing, and pompous writers prefer to use uncommon, bombastic words, which need to be looked up in a dictionary.
When we dress up, we dress either to kill or to suit the occasion.
Of late, power dressing seems to be catching up.
Although its meaning is not clear, it perhaps means dressing which intrigues and baffles the viewer with complicated patterns.
Words like "suave brutality" and "bewildering silences" fall in this category.
Are they oxymoron? A single item hardly makes a dress, and an ensemble is the fashion of the day.
We string a few words, add a turn of phrase, adjust syntax and finally turn them round by some aerobics or calisthenics to make a complete expression.
The appeal and wows it earns depends on the skill of the constructors.
However, some writers achieve miraculous results with minimum words.
Brevity is the key word for the writers economical or miserly with words.
Sexy sirens who ooze plenty of oomph with minimum clothing serve as parallel examples of this type of dressing.
The copy writers achieve spectacular results with just a few words.
Words like id and yang also come to mind.
Such words are like bikinis.
The shorter they are, the more alluring they look.
In a lighter vein, some get wows even when they wear no clothes at all.
Strip-tease artists and emperors are a case in point.
A few celebrity writers win many laurels for pieces best described as 'bovine statacology'.
Not all have a dress sense, and the few blessed with it select the right ensemble to add lustre to their personae.
Similarly, a select few have a way with their words.
In some cases, the person beneath the dress adds grace to dress, and some gifted writers make common words sound extremely meaningful.
Audrey Hepburn's black dress, when recently auctioned, fetched a fortune.
Margaret Mitchell's sentence, "She pleaded with a mute eloquence that was louder than wailing," would enthrall readers for many centuries.