Word and Image

Language has an irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would be ridiculous to hear from another.

George Santayana – The Life of Reason

However personal our words feel, idiosyncratic our verbal expression may be, the language used is nothing that isn’t found in the language of other people. Language is, and must be, imitatory. As Wittgenstein argued, there can be no such thing as a private language: even a language shared solely between two people is not personal, since it must always serve to communicate to some audience, even an audience of one other. International mass communication may doom us to a slow process of mass homogeneity via our language.

Language - with its multiple public and private registers - allows the argumentum ad verecundiam, the argument from authority, of who may speak of what and where, and of how they must speak in order to be heard, understood, accepted. Words may be outlawed, banned, coined, butchered, mocked, but always by someone who rises to their full height and fuller authority and fullest offence-taking. And a thing you cannot name may as well not exist.

Linguistic utterances may be vigorously circumscribed, by consensus or stealth, but to circumscribe the possibilities of the line taken for a walk is a far harder task for even the most determined censorious authority.