***Special Wordpaths Alert***

Go to nytimes.com and read From Books, New President Found Voice. Or don't -- just sit quietly and think about these two excerpts: 

Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power "to transform": "with the right words everything could change...

And...

As Fred Kaplan's illuminating new biography ("Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer") makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading... Both men...use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln's case, Mr. Kaplan notes, "The tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him."