'The French call it pain, the Germans call it Brot and we call it bread; and we are right, because it is bread.' So wrote (I have been told though I have not been able to verify the reference) an English theorist of language in the 17th century. The thought is at once robust and lunatic. The writer believes that there are true words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism.

LRB 25 April 1991 | PDF Download