Language

Language creates meaning by difference.

The word »cat« and the word »hat« differ only in their first letters.

But that difference indicates the wisdom of placing the item on one's head.

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As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

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 – Albert Jay Nock (1873-1945)
 – Memoirs of a Superfluous Man [1943], IV, ch. 1

The common language of the Compost tribes is known as »Cinema Babble«, though a loose translation. Better to be safe and speak as a fragrance.

Frank speaks his cinema-babble in the dark, wishing himself across the sea to the inimitable Piccadilly. He remembers how an onion crossed his palm somewhere on down the Lost Highway, and how the shape of Piccadilly's bald head mimicked, exactly, the curve of the onion. Vidalia the harbinger, Vidalia the prophecy.

With its vocabulary of approximately one million words, English is by far the world's richest language – but only because is so gleefully accepts words from other languages.

For example, there is no counterpart in English for 'silhouette,' 'caravan,' 'schooner,' 'chipmunk' or 'hammock' – to mention just a few – so we use the foreign word itself.

Indeed, a mere 5% of words in English are derived from Anglo-Saxon.