Words are meaningful and important to me, as you can imagine. They are almost beings to me. It’s like they’re physical, and I can hold them in my hand.

We just had a new subscriber from Sweden, and I find the word Sweden evokes so much in me that I am sure words are real things. The word Sweden, for example, is strongly the country and its people and even its climate. One word covers a lot of territory.

Then take Zimbabwe, where a new subscriber also just came from. I love getting my tongue around the word Zimbabwe. And the word Zimbabwe makes a different music from the equally wonderful word Sweden.

I did once visit the coast of Sweden near Denmark one afternoon so long ago when I was an entirely different person wandering the globe.

And I would love to visit Zimbabwe one day. I would like to visit everywhere. God in Heavenletters™ says that He is everywhere, and we are One with Him, so this must mean that we have traveled far and wide and already have visited every land – probably every galaxy! Well, I would love to roam the stars with each one of you. It could be we have never stopped and are doing it right now.

What word is not wonderful? I love words all by themselves. I love the flow of them, and I love names and names of people. I am amazed at how many names there are in the world, even in the telephone book of one small town like Fairfield. Names are endless, and they all came from something and have a long history. So I love the stories of words too.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the etymologies of the words Sweden and Zimbabwe:

Sweden derives from the Old English Sweoðeod, in Old Norse: Sviþjoð. The etymology of the first element, Svi, links to suos (”one’s own”, “of one’s own kin”). The last element, þjoð, means “people”, cognate with deut in Deutsch and teut in Teutons. A Sualainn (Irish name) means (literally) Swedeland and is formed from an ethnonym Sua.

Zimbabwe is an alteration of Shona Dzimba-dze-mabwe, translated as “houses of stone” (dzimba = plural of imba, “house”; mabwe = plural of bwe, “stone”), referring to the stone-built capital city of the ancient trading empire of Great Zimbabwe. Alternatively, the element zi means “big” — thus “big houses of stone.”

From my schoolteaching days, I remember that there are words that themselves are metaphors, like daisy which means Day’s Eye, and dandelion, which means Lion’s Tooth. Come to think of it, I wonder if all words weren’t metaphors to begin with.

What do you like about words, and what are some of your favorites?