Most of the time the language we speak is barely visible to us. We are more concerned with what it can do: buy us a train ticket; persuade the neighbours to keep the noise down; get us off the hook when we've done something wrong. And yet few issues are more important in human life. After food and shelter, which are necessary for survival, language and its symbolic analogues
" exercise the most crucial determinations in our social relations, our thought processes, and our understanding of who and what we are.
Even food and shelter do not come into our lives undefined. Menus that offer 'succulent, cornfed baby chicken, drizzled with a tingling lemon sauce' probably take this principle to extremes, but for me, I remember, 'scrag end stew' was a lost cause from the
beginning.