Written by Derrick Jones on March 9th, 2025.
If you’ve ever nodded your head at the expression words are cheap I’m here to argue that the idiom is not an axiom.
Words, while they can be cheap, are sometimes unbelievably valuable. In 2024, Michele Obama was paid $750,000 for a single hour of public speaking. Humans speak at around an average of 7,500 hundred words per hour, meaning last year the former first lady made about $100 per word. Hardly what I would call cheap.
Value is relative, and so is the word cheap. Here is another lens on the saying: Imagine losing a loved one suddenly, without a chance to see them before they pass to the great beyond. How much would you pay for the chance to talk to them one more time? How much would you pay for every word you could say to them before they went? How much would you pay for every final word you could hear them share with you?
Dropping the experiment, forgetting dollar amounts, how valuable would those parting words be to you? How much solace, peace, or closure could they have the opportunity to bring? Yet again, these words are hardly what I would call cheap.
Words have power. Words are conduits of meaning. Words are one way we communicate the numinous, effervescent experience of life, understanding, and grace to others. Words are a pathway to life after death, offering the potential to live on in the hearts and minds of others even many years after we are gone.
While I find meaning all around me, one of my earliest “conclusions” as I sought meaning in a world I still struggle to understand was this: Connection to others is Meaningful. I can’t explain why, or perhaps I could, but that would cost you a LOT of words. I do know that words are one powerful way we connect to others, that we express ourselves, that we show that we hear someone else, and that we can ourselves be heard. Words are meaningful, and in some instances, words are meaning itself.
Words. Are. Not. Cheap.
Use them wisely.