Feeding Your Vocabulary

"I am mesmerized by words,"

as I said in my Common App essay. In fact, the vast majority of my essay focused on words and my ardent love of them, as I wrote about in this post. However, I questioned whether an admissions officer might find it confusing that someone who wrote about her love of words chose to apply for engineering instead of, say, English. Hence, my essay was in need of a shift into another realm, which I did of course, with more word appreciation.

"I am mesmerized by words. They provide a window into another's mind and an entrance into another's heart. Infinite possibilities arise with them. Yet, the words I love are becoming anachronisms. 140 characters surpasses the restrictiveness of a paragraph, shrinking a select few phrases into a handful of letter, thereby removing all unique diction. The calm, clear expression of views is threatened by alternative facts and misguided politeness. Communication that resonate centuries, even millennia, later cannot be compared to a Facebook post. Words have power. To save and hurt. To unite and fracture. To wage wards and inspire revolutions. This power is available to everyone; how irresponsible it would be to ignore that."

 So here's a tribute to a few beautiful words, because, as one of my favorite teachers recently reminded me, your vocabulary only stops growing when you stop feeding it: