When Red Isn’t Scarlet or Rose

People underestimate the power of words. Individual symbols in black or red on a white background to a baby mean nothing at all. He never even recognizes the symbols as letters. To a young grade school student they mean homework to try to understand them. Someone who speaks a foreign language may recognize them as words, but they hold no meaning for them.

But to those who do know how to read those words they hold many different meanings. One sentence alone can mean multiple things depending upon who the reader is. A sentence taken out of context can be construed to mean something totally opposite of what it was originally intended to say.

When we are reading a book, we have the rest of the book to put that sentence into perspective. The rest of the paragraph, chapter or novel will help to clarify the sentence in question. But if all we have is a sentence we can decide to make it mean whatever we want it to mean.

Just as we must be careful how we use words when we write them, we also must be sure to read with clarity. If the only word for the color red was ‘red’ how would we distinguish between scarlet, crimson, garnet, ruby, sangria, rose, mahogany and many other shades of this color? We can see the correct word helps to define our meaning.

Along this same line of thinking, it’s easy to describe something physical. A brown table can be easily imagined with a valid description. But when we are talking about emotions and thoughts, intangible objects that have no physical description, it can get confusing.

When you add in someone who has never been able to identify his or her emotions, it’s hard to understand what is actually meant by some words. To someone such as this words such as “love” “compassion” “caring” and “sympathy” can all be lumped together as the same emotion.

Broken people do not understand emotions. So many times people who have suffered emotional trauma mistake any positive emotion as love. And they mistake sex for love as well. So a woman broken during childhood will mistake a young man’s friendship as sexual interest believing he loves her. And she will begin to truly care for him.

It’s an even bigger tragedy if that man uses her honest feelings against her and manipulates her into believing it’s love. Already devoid of dreams and hopes for a future, she puts all her faith in this savior. This man is going to rescue her from the hell she thinks she has lived thus far.

Unfortunately this often ends up in an exchange of one hell for another. Perhaps in the very beginning he fooled her, but once she was hooked, the truth appeared. Now the word “sex” means rape instead of love to her. A day of “love” means a day when nothing was lobbed in anger. Words of emotion are confusing.

She writes her emotions out as she sees them, but she’s as confused about what she is writing as any reader might be who sees them. The words don’t mean the same thing. While the original meaning was “scarlet” the reader understands “rose”. What a difference there is between those two words. Red isn’t just red.

And so it is with writing – one can’t just sit down and write expecting the reader to understand without using the precise word necessary. The words used make a difference.

I saw an old movie or show one time with Sally Field playing a teenager with a diary. She wrote the words “faded into nothingness”. Her mother saw red, thinking she was talking about sexual activity. In her innocence the teen daughter merely meant she was lost into a world of extreme joyful fantasy. I guess it shows if you are low enough to dig into the personal writings of another person, know that your understanding of the words you read may not be the ones intended by the writer.