Let's Have a Few Words
There are words that have power and evoke an immediate reaction. Catastrophic, terminal and devastation are all words that command our attention, causing all else to fade into the background.
On the other hand, distraction is a word I would put right up there with “stuff”; in fact, if it had a color it would be beige. I recently heard myself give the excuse that I was “distracted” as a reason for not paying attention while doing some mundane task that I bungled. A few days later I was flipping through the TV channels as a diversion from a cruddy day at work, and came across the History Channel. The commentator, in a French accent, spoke of the grisly details of a torture method used centuries ago known as ‘distraction’- literally the pulling apart of someone by tying their arms and legs to horses who ran off in opposite directions. The word suddenly took on a whole new meaning, yielding the same power of catastrophic, terminal, and devastation. Nothing worse than literally being pulled apart. The color of this word, red.