/lit/ - Literature

>>14760439
they're CUTE
>[O]ur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon — the most favoured alternative method.
>Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. But then, that acumen has been concentrated primarily upon the practical business of life [and so] this is likely enough not to be the best way of arranging things if our interests are more extensive or intellectual than the ordinary. … And it must be added too, that superstition and error and fantasy of all kinds do become incorporated in ordinary language and even sometimes stand up to the survival test (only, when they do, why should we not detect it?). Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.

>[T]he principal example that we chose was the hero of Kafka’s story Metamorphosis, a commercial traveller called Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a monstrous cockroach, although he retains clear memories of his life as an ordinary human being. Are we to speak of him as a man with the body of a cockroach, or a cockroach with the memories and consciousness of a man? "Neither," Austin declared. "In such cases, we should not know what to say. This is when we say ‘words fail us’ and mean this literally. We should need new words. The old ones just would not fit. They aren’t meant to cover this kind of case.