Emojis Be Damned, Use your Big Boy Words

Modern communication is evolving at a pace that few of us fully appreciate, and not always in a direction that enriches our ability to think or express ourselves. One of the clearest indicators is our dependence on emojis. These tiny digital symbols, once used sparingly as accents, now often serve as substitutes for entire sentences. What began as a playful shorthand has quietly reduced our capacity to communicate with emotional clarity and intellectual accuracy. Which leads to a simple invitation. Start a new habit. Choose one new word every week, learn it, understand it, and find a natural moment to use it in daily conversation. The goal is not to sound superior or pretentious. It is not a performance. It is simply an intentional effort to move the Overton window of normal expression. When you stretch your vocabulary, you stretch the possibilities of thought itself, and you subtly encourage the people around you to reach for language with more nuance, more shading, more depth. Humanity has always used symbols to record meaning. Caveman drawings. Iconography etched into stone. The digital icons that decorate our computers and phones. Glyphs as old as hieroglyphs. Across time these forms allowed us to capture events and express fears, hopes, faith, and wonder. But none of these systems were ever meant to replace language. They were companions to it. Civilized discourse once aspired to a higher form. Debate clubs. Public forums. The intellectual jousting that sharpened the mind and shaped a generation of thinkers. At our peak, language was not only a tool. It was an art form. Consider the sheer scale of it. A common unabridged dictionary contains around one hundred thousand words. The Oxford English Dictionary reaches more than six hundred thousand. That is an enormous palette for expression. So how is it that in a time when more words exist than at any point in human history, our day to day communication is reduced to a yellow circle making a face. Uncivilized men run out of words long before they run out of feelings, and when language deteriorates, civility often follows. I do not believe it is accidental. There is a cultural drift, subtle but persistent, that moves our emotional and intellectual expression toward the simplest possible indicators. Positive or negative. Happy or sad. Angry or hungry. Entire internal landscapes reduced to binary classifications, as if the complexity of human experience can be captured with a few brightly colored dots. When the mechanisms of expression become dull, the subtleties fall away. Precision evaporates. Ambiguity rushes in to fill the space. What remains is primal and guttural, a stripped down version of human connection that is less than the sum of its parts. The capacity for nuance collapses, and with it the capacity for empathy, persuasion, curiosity, and understanding. And there is something deeper at stake. When you control the vocabulary of a tribe, you exert remarkable influence over its thoughts, its emotional responses, and its moral choices. Language shapes the boundaries of what we can imagine. Reduce the range of expression and you reduce the range of thought. Reduce the range of thought and you limit the possibilities of a culture. This is why it matters to reclaim our words. To add new ones. To use them boldly. To let them refine the way we interpret the world and communicate with one another. A single new word each week is a simple habit, almost too small to notice at first, yet powerful enough to shift the trajectory of your thinking. When you strengthen your language, you strengthen your mind. And when you strengthen your mind, you expand the world you live in. 888-350-1543 HabitsTracker.coach