“The linguistic urge to derive types is not ‘natural’, and the categories imposed upon our minds by those implicit in our languages are at once traps, as when we are unconscious of their incompleteness, and wings, as when we begin to understand both their powers and their limitations, always keeping both in play. The seeming authority and completeness of the categories is deceptive. Their actual origins and purposes are stranger and more provocative than we have yet been bold enough to imagine together.

There remains for us a terrain more alien than spacetime, and more provocative than stars… the origins and potentials of our peculiar relationships with language, knowledge… and discovery. We would do well to examine the categories that inform our selection of types of phenomenon, and, particularly their roots.

We may find that the roots from which we derive our experience of the categories have been damaged (they became tokenized over time, losing crucial aspects of meaning and association) and becoming thus aware… begin to repair them together.

These roots can be understood as primitives from which all categories inherit features of character and connotation. The Sun. Food. Eyes. Dream. Time. Light. Whatever we take these to ‘mean’ instructs the associations and ideas that the categories suggest to our apprehension in language and thought.”

— an anonymous informant