SEPTEMBER 2025: The World Through Words – EXCESS.

Words have traditionally been the backbone of intelligent communications. Some researchers suggest that humans began using spoken words, anywhere between 50000 and 70000 years ago. Words then were often just a collation of sounds, but they seemed to have served their purpose. How they managed their communications in their worlds so long ago can only be imagined!

Today, in the second millennium of the common era, as per Ethnologue, which is a language catalogue and resource site, there are around 7111 languages in the world (not including dialects, sign languages) with an estimated 840 million words.

And with such a surfeit of languages and words, our world should naturally (if not certainly!) be a very interesting one for those of us who will only take some time from our busy routines, to peek into the world of words.

This time, the random word that has surfaced is EXCESS.

It is often said that if there is one thing that can commonly describe civilizations across millennia, it is the widespread excess of all kinds that were celebrated when these societies were at their zenith.

Think of the excesses in the Roman Empire. The glorification of widespread political corruption, the extravagant displays of wealth by its elites, military overspending as a strategy for geographical expansion, violent public spectacles such as the gladiatorial conquests and the practices of gluttony and decadent lifestyles were plainly normative.

Middle Eastern history seemed to have its own versions. The rise and fall of the Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians often involved brutal conquests and subjugation excesses.

Excesses in South Asian civilizations often involved extreme social stratification and the application of mindless cultural interventions by the invaders.

Western civilizations across both sides of the Atlantic have also been no strangers to excesses. Even as recently as in the nineteenth and twentieth century America, material extravagance of the Gilded Age, the unchecked consumerist society and the unilateral gains of the capitalist model of economic growth ensured the exponential rise of profligacy from an equally fast shifting of the moral compass.

With such a background across the ages and the continents, it should not come as a surprise that excessive consideration is being attributed here to this word!

Excess is too much of something, like big-time overindulgence.

Philosophers, literary giants and political commentators, all seem to have had excessive concerns about the excesses of human beings.

Plato suggested that excess of liberty, whether it lies in the state or in individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. 

Nietzsche cautioned that the mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

Dickens concluded that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Oscar Wilde though had a different point of view. To him, moderation is a fatal thing and that nothing succeeds like excess.

Will Durant believed that every form of government tends to perish by an excess of its own principle.

The Tamil saint poet Tiruvalluvar has advised both rulers and the common man to conquer with forbearance all the excesses of insolence. Other verses in the Tirukural suggest moderation in food and financial habits, warns rulers on the ills of excessive taxation and links excessive love for dishonest gains to everlasting pain.

But I am sure that unlike such excessive caution that these people have expressed, an excess of humor should always be welcomed.

Back in the day, excessive use of commas was considered a very serious crime. That view usually resulted in a long sentence.

A friend of mine got jailed for excessive hay production. I had to bale the farmer out.

Eggs have recently been added to the endangered species list. Due to excessive poaching.