We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Now and again he spoke to those that served him and thanked them in their own language. They smiled at him and said laughing: 'Here is a jewel among hobbits!

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

I have tasted words, I have seen them. Never had her hands reached out in darkness and felt the texture of pure marble, never had her forehead bent forward and, as against a stone altar, felt safety. I am now saved. Her mind could not then so specifically have seen it, could not have said, "Now I will reveal myself in words, words may now supercede a scheme of mathematical-biological definition. Words may be my heritage and with words...A lady will be set back in the sky....there was hope in a block of unsubstantiated marble, words could carve and set up solid altars...Thought followed the wing that beat its silver into seven-branched larch boughs.

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.