Ill communication

Our linguistic habits lead us into error. For example, we are apt to say, “I imagine,” when what we should have said is, “The curtain was lifted that I might see.”

I wish I had posted this quote on April 1, for it parodically reverses what we've come to expect from a treatment of “our linguistic habits.” Such an invocation typically announces that we’re about to read something reductive and deflationary, not something ampliative and psychedelic. But Aldous Huxley suggests that ordinary language misleads us by being too modest rather than too suggestive. Since we’ve missed April Fool’s, let us instead match Huxley’s phantasmagorical investigations to our spring forward, whereby we lose an hour of activity and gain an hour of light.