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Well, some people think that words, once they are spoken or written, are dead... that instead of having life and potential, as they do before they are used, their meaning is frozen now, and you can't pull anything new out of them.
Emily Dickinson, in this poem, thinks that words don't live *until* they are expressed in some meaningful way... and that, instead of the words losing potential... she thinks that words, unused, are the ones that are dead... and that by using them in speech or in writing, that is what brings them to live and gives them meaning.
Here is a link to the poem:
http://www.bartleby.com/113/1089.html
To me, in this poem, Dickinson defines the cultural and semantic polarities of language and communication...
"A word is dead when it is said, some say" suggests that some believe that there is an internal, psychological, intellectual and cultural life to words. They believe that words have immortal lives with infinite meanings when unuttered, such as during meditation...an Eastern cultural point of view.
Once uttered, some say, a word's infinite possible meanings are cut short...a word becoming "defined" or delimited by cultural parameters and the personal perspectives of the listener. This is one possible reason why Asian cultures tend to avoid verbal expression of emotions. There is the belief that a word cannot express all of a feeling, and words when said can suggest only some meanings, "killing off" others...so that the emotion and the word essentially die.
On the other hand, Dickinson offers an alternative philosophy. "I say it just begins to live that day" presents a Western perspective on communication. Dickinson insists that the internal world of a word, the unuttered word's meaning, is limited by the cultural and intellectual perspective of the thinker. Only when spoken does a word come alive, its meaning brought to life by the listener, the listener's input, the listener's interaction with the word and the speaker.
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