WORD POWER

Among the stacks of books I'm currently reading, is another SIX WEEKS to WORDS of POWER by Wilfred Funk.

Great book so far and I am going to share it with anyone who views this blog and for my own record to look back on.

"If you are young it will be easy for you to do. But never give age as an excuse. You can teach an old dog new tricks. This is the scientific discovery made by Dr. Irving Lorge, a brilliant psychologist at Columbia University. By a series of tests he has proved that older people lose nothing in mental power if they will keep up their active interests. They lose slightly in speed. Yes. But he showed that the ability of the mind to think and create, barring illness, is with you until the age of 90 and past. Your body gets old, Dr. Lorge says, but not your mind if you care to use it. The mind never retires!

There are a host of dramatic instances in history that point up this fact.

Rodin, the sculptor, did some of his finest work after 70. Michelangelo was 70 when he painted the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Verdi composed the opera Otello at 75 and Falstaff at 80; and also Anatole France at 80 and Thomas Hardy at 88 were in the full flush of literary creation; while at 98 Titian painted the Battle of Lepanto. As a matter of true fact, 5 percent of all the works of genius have been done after the age of 80.

So neither age nor youth is left with a shred of excuse for lack of performance in any field controlled by the mind. Both can continue to advance their knowledge through the years. And, in the present instance, both can profit so greatly by word study and can get such keen enjoyment out of acquiring the art of superior self-expression. For nothing can make a man feel more confident than a mastery of his native speech. On the other hand, nothing can give a man such a sense of inferiority as a stammering incompetence in the use of words."