The preloaded paintbrush

Someone had said: Words are the biggest impediment to communication.

Words started out as convenience. Instead of saying a full sentence, saying one word would suffice. That word comes preloaded with a meaning.

Yet that preloading is a problem too. If I want to paint in pink and my brush is preloaded with green, the pink colouring gets distorted. If I say "kill" in the sense of "finalise" (an idea, say) and in the listener's mind "kill" means "terminate", that preloading corrupts the meaning I am trying to communicate. That is why, when we want to be abundantly clear, we need to use simpler and simpler words, words that are almost unitary in their application.

But even in this process of simplification sometimes we reach a dead end, where there is not a single word available that is capable of conveying what I want to convey right now, without any preloading whatever. Finding a word without any preloading is difficult because, after all, preloading IS the purpose of wordification. 

Sometimes when I look at a sky laden with monsoon clouds with white egrets flying across, that feeling is... indescribable. Words fail. When words fail, we succeed. We succeed in silently touching a level of thinking and feeling that is super-communication. We are silent not because we do not know words but because all the preloaded words that we know are insufficient to express this sensation. 

Then it is time to drop the brush and become the paint.