I think words can have a life of their own. In a sense they are still just words, but the imapct a single word can have can be life-changing- think of the effect of the word 'guilty' n a courtroom. However, their life is not just through things like that- they can resonate and affect us deeply. I recently watched a lecture by Professor Chomskyin which he said that human language reprsented a chalenge for evolutionary theory because it functions so differently from anything else in nature that it represents a challenge to explain it.
