If you turn on your radio or TV any time of the day or night, you'll hear someone talking from dawn to dusk. Our lawyers are experts in debate and argumentation, in oral speech. A member of the bar was once asked how he decided to enter the profession. He said that when he was choosing a course as a young fellow, his mother advised him, "Son you better take up law. Since you talk a lot, you might as well be paid for much talking. Is it perhaps because of this expertise that someone remarked that the president should execute the laws-and some of the lawyers?
Whenever electioneering time comes around, we are bombarded by a lot of talk as the whole country is turned into one vast Land of Promise. One candidate promised everything so that he or she will be elected.
A statistician says that the average person spends at least 13 years of his or her (mostly her) life talking. He says that in a normal day something like 18,000 words are likely spoken, roughly equivalent to a book of 54 pages. And in the course of a single year, our words would fill 66 books, each containing 800 pages. How fortunate that everything we say is not written down, or every house on Planet Earth will be full of books.
If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams- the more they condensed the deeper they burn. Tattlers and gossipers have the easiest job of all. Nothing is easier than fault finding; no character, no talents are needed to set up in the grumbling business.
One young man told me there's hardly any need of going to church anymore, because even back to his home he hears a lot of sermonizing from his elders. He says by three days, such an elder opens the floodgates of his mouth and a cataract of words incessantly flows out like Niagara Falls.
When talking to a child, let us note that he or she remembers 50 percent of what he or she sees, 70 percent of what he or she says, 90 percent of what he or she does, and only 10 percent of what he or she hears. So don't sermonize to him or her so long.
The Bible says that a fool generally talk a lot ( Ecclesiastes 10:14; Psalm 29:11) but when he keeps quiet for only a short while, some may mistaken him to be a wise guy (Proverbs 17:28).
