Ever wonder where your words end up?

We send our words out into the good world, where they mix and mingle, and then almost immediately start to have sex with all the ideas in other people's minds. Newly liberated, they tend to not be too discriminating, which has certain unexpected effects.

We usually have no problem imagining the offspring of our words meeting up with normal ideas; this is after all the foundation of effective communication. Things head into unknown territory when our words have what they afterwards might call a moment of indiscretion with Crazy and Ugly.

After a pregnant omg-wtf moment, we get the bastardized and unwanted "No no, I didn't mean that"s, leading to the horrific remains of those responses still-born and strangled by our self-censoring. We are either unhappy parents, or grieving ex-parents.¹ Granted, this is also what happens when an idea that looks Beautiful turns out to be a post-op teratogenic abortion saved by some NICU long on talent and short on genetic foresight.

But that's the genesis of our ideas. In any given conversation, we end up with some bright ones, beaming with potential; some average ones we tend to ignore; and some horrors we try to shut out of our minds and forget.

We can't do that though for two reasons. 1) Once countenanced, horrors rarely content themselves to recede into the sunset of the Forgotten. And 2) we would be bad parents. We have to love all our children and help them grow up well, as daunting as that may sometimes seem.

After all, we never know what the future may bring; that polio-afflicted reprobate might someday become the next President.

1. Note that we have words like 'widow', and 'orphan', but no word for 'parents of a dead child'.