Words are saturated with time. We are saturated with words for we are temporal beings. Language is not merely a system of semiotics, it doesn't merely represent the world. Rather it constructs it, performs it, creates it and destroys it. It morphs aspects of our reality and forces them to filter through its phonetic and conceptual prisms. If language performs, then the dictionary of all possible words is the cosmos. Welcome to the world of language, the reality in which we live...

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Beneficiary and Victim

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

- Aldous Huxley

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