Khalil Gibran – Autorretrato con musa, c. 1911 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Khalil Gibran once said that people will never understand one another unless language is reduced to seven words. What would your seven words be?
I love you. Do you love me? Yes. No.
This will solve a basic communication problem with people I care about, but I’m not sure it would solve the global understanding problem.
I tried to find the Gibran quote and was unable. I would like to know what his seven words were. Personally I think seven words are not enough. Michelle W. here from WordPress needed more to make us understand the meaning of this prompt.
Does the quote she choose means people are not able to learn more than seven words properly to communicate with each other? I found a Gibran’s quote that says:
“All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.”
Not much of a feast if only leaves seven crumbs. Maybe his idea was to find seven sublime words, but that doesn’t helps to communicate, only points to great ideas we have to elaborate with more words. Let me think:
Love, Faith, Hope, Family, God, Friendship, Beauty… I need more words to express all what I consider sublime and to form sentences to explain why. These words alone are useless to speak with another person and communicate what I want to say.
And then, what about those thousands little things that occupies our lives and are the subject of our everyday, sometimes wonderful conversations?
No, definitely I can’t find my seven words.
Note: After completing my post I read A Mom’s Blog’s contribution. I learned that Gibran’s quote is from a poem and he is using seven as a symbolic number, probably meaning that to understand one another the best way is going right to the point. If that is the meaning, I agree. Seven symbolizes perfection, so maybe he was trying to say that to reach the understanding we need the perfect amount of words. Obvious. Well, who knows? I’ll leave the discussion to specialists. Have a good day and good luck.
More seven words posts on the next page:
i can’t even imagine a world where our language is reduced to seven words. But then I am kind of a blabber mouth. 🙂 Perhaps though we’d all get along a lot better if we kept these seven words in mind: understanding, empathy, kindness, mercy, tolerance, sympathy, perseverance.
I agree. Thank you for your comment.