I have been paying attention lately to the words people use. It is interesting how much one can learn about people from their language. While most of our communication happens non-verbally, the words we use reveal much.

In every culture, communication evolves. From the written to the spoken word, things change as time passes. For example, in a recent conversation with my son, he mentioned that he hadn’t seen someone for a second. Baffled, I looked around the room to see if the person was there.

When I failed to see anyone else in the room, I quizzed my son about what he meant by a “second.” He said that in today’s nomenclature, a second means the same thing as “a while” used to. Today’s youth use a minute and a second interchangeably, which can be completely baffling. I know we live in a time where things move fast, but I wasn’t aware our pace of life was like that.

Another interesting point about words is our rush to label things. The challenging thing about labels is the variance in their meanings. An excellent example of this comes from politics. Often we hear terms like conservative and liberal used to describe candidates.

Each of these terms defines a position, but like the transition from a while to a second, the meaning has shifted. It is almost impossible to define political terms like this precisely. What may be conservative in one part of the country may be considered right wing in another. The same applies to the definition of liberal. Yet these terms and others like them are used to convey an image or point of view.

Our everyday communication has become imprecise. In our attempt to speed up communication we have dumbed things down. This causes meaning to get lost in the process. It is no secret that reading levels in America have been on the decline. While I am a huge proponent of the internet, I point a finger at it as a contributor to the reduction in reading ability.

The Internet has billions of pages of text, yet few of us read much of it anymore. We skim read, picking out high points and sampling only the things that catch our eye. Eye tracking studies reveal how images capture more of our attention than does text on a page.

Communication is important and the words used are becoming more important than ever. Words have power and the way we use them either gives us power or reduces credibility. Consider the implication of saying a pound of hamburger is 80 percent lean versus saying it is 20 percent fat. While the phrases say the same thing, the implications and perceptions are different. By controlling how we frame our words, we control the interpretation and understanding. Words and phrases used the right way can impact a perspective on a topic or point dramatically.

Throughout the years, presidential communications have been dumbed down to appeal to broader audiences. Per a 2014 study by Vocative, a web research company, the reading grade level of presidential speeches has dropped from 21 to 5.9. That is a drop from a Ph.D. level in 1917 to a fifth-grade level in 2014.

We live in an interesting time, surrounded by more information than ever before. Yet much of the information is becoming useless as our ability to read and interpret it declines. There is no easy fix for this, but a step in the right direction is to turn off YouTube and pick up a book. It might surprise you what you discover.

Jeff Hough is a business author, blogger and speaker in Pocatello.