>from THE ANALYTICAL LANGUAGE OF JOHN WILKINS by JORGE LUIS BORGES
(in the Chinese Encyclopedia) "...The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into:
1 belonging to the Emperor
2 embalmed
3 trained
4 pigs
5 sirens
6 fabulous
7 stray dogs
8 included in this classification
9 trembling like crazy
10 innumerable
11 drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12 et cetera
13 just broke the vase
14 from a distance look like flies
...it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what the universe is. "This world," David Hume wrote, "...was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some super-annuated deity, and ever since his death has run on..." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, V. 1779) We can go further; we suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God."
... perhaps the most lucid words ever written about language are by Chesterton:
He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless and more nameless, than the colours of an autumn forest... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilised stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside, noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire. (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904)
complete article: http://www.semiogeny.com/webjournal/sub/borges.html