Words conjure pictures and emotions Words act as triggers of emotions and mental pictures. Words can make you shout for joy and words can make you weep. Words can put you into shock and words can make you laugh. Words can make your brain brush flow, painting pictures unable to be duplicated. Words can recreate an experience, creating for the listener an entirely new experience, yet so much the same.
Words can actually be an experience of their own, an experience of the imagination.
I do not believe words have been called to duplicate an experience, but only to describe it and allow a recreation of that experience to occur within the listener as a unique experience, that is, an experience with words. As mentioned before, if I describe to you my experience the first time I see the ocean, I will be using symbols, or words, to describe my experience. You will have your own experience allowing your mind to produce pictures drawn and painted by the words I use. My laborious task is choosing the words that I think will cause your experience with my words to be most similar to my experience with the ocean scene. Denotatively speaking, we will both picture sand and a huge body of water.