Word & World: The Alphabet

A deeper examination of seemingly trivial parts of speech reveals a profound paradox: far from being a clear mirror of reality, language, in its natural application, fundamentally obfuscates the reality it is meant to reflect.While perfectly coherent on a functional level, a substantial discrepancy exists between our verbal articulation of existence and the capacity to truly conceive of the reality underlying that description. This tension is most acute when addressing the ways we speak abstract matters like truth and knowledge.The following is an attempt to reflect upon this tension and illustrate that the mystery - the riddle - lies at the very root of our sense of coherence.