Words "signify only Men's peculiar Ideas, and that by a perfectly arbitrary imposition". I love how Locke produced this by accident, intending to write about cognition and perception and then spiraling helplessly into language. I love that it prefigures the twentieth-century "linguistic turn", in that sense--the understanding of language as an arbitrary but inevitable filter--a sort of "empirical turn" in that sense, if you wanna be cute, yeah? No high rationalism; no objective induction? I love that it sponsors a thousand eighteenth-century flowers, and, like, historical linguistics and the amassing of data that we otherwise would have ignored in favour of weighty pronouncements on the essence of language and how it resides in speech or writing and how it achieves its fullest nature. I love that this hits like a shot to the dome. ( )