https://medium.com/ill-ixi-lli/language-vs-human-intelligence-13441c78a733

“Language. Like everything that matters, we have a lot of provisional knowledge about it, but know nearly nothing of why we have it. It’s the stuff of science-fiction, or more — utterly bewildering in nature, forms and histories — and yet it seems just as common to us as socks. Unlike protective foot garments, however, language is incredibly dangerous. Do we say what we see … or does what we can say delimit what we may see? This does not depend upon language itself, but our relationships with it — the purposes for which we employ it — and whether they are themselves intelligent or deceptive. Too often, in too many domains, language becomes a god that seems to us to be able to declare reality or identity, and this is as lethal as it is impossible.”