Words are wonderful. They contain great power and personality as they convey your experience precisely. Unfortunately some words get lost or forgotten in our increasingly homogenised world.

Like a beautiful beachside cottage with six stories of concrete and chrome sprouting from its behind, some words get hidden beneath a prefix. Numerous exquisite words have been left to languish, uttered only in corruption of their true meaning.

One such word is gruntled. Such a sweet sense does this word convey of earthy warmth and smiling innocence. Its intention is happy and pleased, yet rarely is it spoken.

I can’t remember hearing that a person felt gruntled, but the number of people I hear being disgruntled is legion. Our community uses the negation disgruntled with an angry familiarity whilst it’s delightful origin lies lonely and idle.

Another word that is largely lost as it fades from our collective mind is whelmed. Whelmed is the sense of being immersed in something endlessly flowing. Like the cool purity of spring water eternally welling up within us, whelmed alludes to an overflow of permanent life sustaining power.

To be whelmed is to accept with humble pleasure the infinite potential that surrounds you at every moment. Unfortunately it seems our community is over whelmed. Overwhelmed refuses the opportunities to glide like a dolphin in the ocean of our mind, preferring instead to live on limited rations in a leaky life raft.

The third word I will mention is ease. To be sure this word is as yet extinct but it is at a political disadvantage. Ease is ok but it stands too close to lazy. Ease increasingly acquires a subtle guilt that suggests you may be hiding from challenges.

Ease honours the possibility that things might work out smoothly and well; that challenges can be a playful success. More commonly however we hear the details of disease. It seems it is disease that’s gets our attention.

Be aware of the words that you use since these words that we wield both construct and reflect the focus of our minds. Negative prefixes have their place but remember the joyful source.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary life member of the Australian Counselling Association. He has a practice in the Northern Beaches. Phone 9973 4997.