Four-letter words

Isn't it interesting or weird or facinating that words carrying great meaning are usually four-letter ones. It occured to me this afternoon watching a not bad movie, 'Country Strong' starring Gynneth Paltrow. She was belting out a song about "home" and I started running through all the emotionally-charged words of only four letters, like:
love
hate
feel
evil
true
loss
fair
hell
hope
heal
good
soul
soft
kind
mean
give
kiss
pain
hard
hurt
kill
live
fear
help
best
gone
save..........add to the list........it's endless. Three letters have even stronger meaning, like "hot" "sad" "yes" and "bad", for instance. And then there are the two-letter variety, how about "no!"

Why is that? Why did our language develop this way? Maybe so it would be easy for children to learn these concepts young and understand what they mean, so they would be grounded in good and evil at a very early age. "Autrocious" or "malevolent" or "generous" or "munificent" would be a little difficult for a two-year-old to grasp. No, kids learn that things are good or evil as parents rear them from the cradle. Must have been thinking about this because we just returned from our grandaughter's baptism in Houston and baptism is all about protecting babies from evil. And trust me, I am a firm believer in the reality of evil. It's all around us, it's real, it's in many people.......we all know a few, sadly.

How beautiful to protect babies from the omnipresent devil.