A word can end a war, a word can heal a wound, a word can turn a poisoned meal into honey and butter.
Söz ola kese savaşı söz ola bitüre başı
Söz ola agulu aşı balıla yağ ide bir söz
Yunus Emre, Dîvân, poem 102 (Mustafa Tatcı, Yûnus Emre Dîvânı: Tenkitli Metin, 2nd ed., Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı, 2005).
A word ends a war.
A word closes a wound.
What Yunus calls baş here is a wound.
In this couplet no head is cut off;
there is a heart that heals.
Today many of us memorize the couplet wrong.
We have turned the word that heals
into a word that cuts.
Poison comes from the same mouth, and honey too.
The difference is not in the length of the word.
To understand what a word is,
look at where it lands.