Is there such a thing as writing or using words with no apparent consequence?
I'm inclined to think not.
It's true that writing may indeed be opaque, questionably crafted, not easily understood or just plain boring but even if it's telling a story or sketches a hypothesis with which you disagree, none of those characteristics render the piece inconsequential.
Should someone elect to paint with words in a more abstract way, even to the point of random irrationality, that too must surely be seen as a creative work as the very thought or intention behind it was to "create" something to be shared. That it defies our regulatory parameters of diction, syntax, comprehension and predictability may rankle but that's usually simply because a thing has the potential to shoehorn us out of our comfort zone. We needn't let it. We have the choice to ignore or explore, the latter inevitably providing by far the more interesting pathway.
Opinion doesn't negate something nor render it inconsequential - it merely pigeonholes it within a frame of reference subjectively for the observer, or in the case of many written pieces nowadays, the consumer.
For isn't that what journalism, as a form of written expression, to a very large extent, has become - fodder for the masses to be consumed, as Frank Zappa would have euphemised, as cheese in its various guises, some bland, some rich and malodorously repugnant.
Exploring the potential of these incantations - and many, if not most, don't carry any manifest form of magic - through an added dimension, brings us to the scriptural concept of "the word."
Some posit that this idea of "the word" encompasses, not the written version of a language but rather the audible presentation of the phonetic - or in another context, the less spiritual idea of inceptual creation through the Big Bang is no more nor less than the background echo that singular event created - ergo: a pronounceable sound. The Buddhists call that sound the eternal Om - the symphony of what creation actually is therefore to repeat that base frequency with your voice over and over again inevitably as they do in meditative chant, must begin to bring one into a sympathetic resonant frequency and harmony (be at one) with the cosmos. The word.
Then there's the sticks and stones argument, that tenet taught to children by their parents as a coping mechanism paradoxically within the framework of prayer and other mysterious word related enchantments, all of which seems suspiciously similar to the paradox of quantum physics where the written word and the sound of the word could be seen as the particle and the waveform respectively.
Words can and do have power but it's arguable whether or not the creator or the recipient (perhaps both) imbue the words with their true potential in the same way the observer influences the particle reality or the healer may or may not be influencing an outcome in a placebo experiment.
These phenomena are all real and powerful yet we still do not fully comprehend the whys and wherefores of the various hypotheses.
All we do know is that they happen and somehow we have a part in the phenomena as do the words we elect to share with the world when we place intention behind them.
I'd say use them wisely.
We truly have no real idea of the manifest potential these magic spells might have and how very far reaching that magic could be.
In the beginning there was the word.
That's all there was.
Perhaps that's all there will ever be.
Abracadabra.
