“You and I exchange lines of dialogue.  Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we  have previously agreed, if tacitly.  Thereby appears the nature of meaning.  It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages.  We understand this all too well and yet, and yet – well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam.  It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up.  As do we all…

“Believe what you like.  Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me.  You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers.  Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.”

-Percival Everett-