Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it? Ford: We're safe. Arthur: Oh good. Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. Arthur: Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word that I wasn't previously aware of.
The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.
"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in the darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word. Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
"Oh, come now, you two," Lady Manston said, "surely it can be no surprise that I have long hoped for an alliance between the Rokesbys and Bridgertons." "Alliance?" Billie echoed, and all George could think was that it was a terrible, clinical word, one that could never encompass all that he had come to feel for her."
"Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems..." "Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue."
Spinoza follows Maimonides in rejecting the ordinary meanings which attach to words, and in asking his readers to attend, not to language, but to the 'ideas' which he is attempting to convey by means of it. Common usage is governed by the imagination, which associates words, not with clear and distinct ideas, but with the confused conceptions of experience. In the language of imagination nothing can be truly described, and nothing is more misleadingly rendered by the imagination than the ultimate subject matter of philosophical speculation - God himself
Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.
But these people were judged very stupid by their friends. Was not Jonathan Strange known to be precisely the sort of whimsical, contradictory person who would publish against himself?
Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most poeple who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.