Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor, " meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
(Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent."
And at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited.
I suspect that the word "atheist" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves.
He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "agnostic" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence.
When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God, " they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand.
But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia.
In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener.
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities.
Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.'" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop.
Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, you get the assignment of, select a word and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right?
So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication.
But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality.
I know that this is a talk, but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them.
So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms.
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today.
Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "gratefulness" and "gratitude" comes up.
So here we go, and I somehow, without a decision, went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking on the parameters of the universe.
And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms."
One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for.
At the beginning, I was going to write, "[In Arabic], " which means, "In your face, " but -- (Laughter) I decided to be smarter and I wrote, "[In Arabic], " which means, "Open your heart."
(Laughter) You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady": Stick to the weather and your health.
(Laughter) But then I decided, what people are really asking when they're asking if a word is real, they're really asking, "Well, how many brains will this give me access to?"
We're all just sort of trapped in our own lexicons that don't necessarily correlate with people who aren't already like us, and so I think I feel us drifting apart a little more every year, the more seriously we take words.
They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison.
What I hope you think is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about.
And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life -- even words, even time.
I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is.
The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.
Now, I prefer that term over magician, because if I were a magician, that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic.
And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "the West" and "the Developing World."
This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language.
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Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor, " meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. 