When I was 5 years old my mother brought my brother and I to our Lola’s house to spend the day while she went to work. We would be the usual rambunctious kids wrecking everything in sight. My brother would stick his head into a large bangga and scream his loudest. I plucked every thorn from the miniature cactus on top of the old out-of-tune piano and sword fight with it against my brother. Our grandmother’s home was old and rickety. If we jumped, the whole house would shake, scaring the resident spiders, and almost giving our poor Lola a heart attack. So that she will have her peace and quiet, when two o’clock came with Helen Vela on the black and white TV  our Lola would shoo us out of the house and exile us to her garden.  Since it was always hot during the summers, my brother and I always laid down under the Gumamela bush and would start plucking its leaves. In an era where video games like Ataris were exclusive for the richest among  us, the second best game in town (for the poorer and most average folks like us) was making bubbles with crushed gumamela leaves and flowers. The more gumamelas we gathered, the bubblier our concoction got. The more muscle we put into crushing the leaves, the thicker the syrupy substance got. Then the afternoon filled with laughter and bubbles and messy clothes. Before long our mother would holler from the tricycle calling us to go home.

In writing, words are like the gumamela leaves. We have to acquire words to be able to concoct an article available for public consumption. The more leaves you put into the mix, the better the brew, in the same way, the more precise the words you put into an article the clearer you can communicate with others. The more words you know the better expressions of thoughts and feelings you can generate. When you generate words that mean exactly what you are thinking, you can successfully say what you mean (sounds circular?). Yes, it is a cycle. It is a process of thinking complex thoughts about a topic and simplifying it into a language people can relate to. Rinda West in her book Myself Among Others: A Sequenced Approach to Writing says that: “Narrative is not merely a starting place. Language determines experience; controlling language in narrative gives writers more control over languages and experience” (West i). Every person has a narration. We all have a story to tell. We tell our parents about our daily experiences, we tell the tricycle driver where we are going and we tell our teachers excuses on why we are turning our homework late (you can always use flash flooding as an excuse if you live near Lagos street). In any conversation, we are relating facts and information that is necessarily for another person to understand us. We do not just mix words like this — pera, ako po, sa outing (money, me and outing). I am sure that when we are asking for an allowance or for gimmick monies, we use a strategy when and how to approach the power and money holders of our homes (re: parents). So, why when we write, we sound like we are blurting out words out of sequence? When we write we are asking our readers to understand, and to have this skill we must understand what we want to say. This is carried out if we have labeled every thought and feeling with the right words.  It is also for personal benefit when we collect words. We benefit because, the more words we have in our vocabulary, the better we understand the world around us. The better we understand our environment, the more we understand ourselves. Example, if we did not know the word hot, we would be in danger of burning ourselves every time we light the kalan or pugon (stove or or oven). The word hot can have  string of other words to protect ourselves and to use it to warn others. This is the simplest example, imagine the possibilities if we have found the most exceptional word in the planet. How many words do you own?

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