I want to suggest, to play on the Gospel of St. John, that in the beginning was the word; words are not the names for things but, to steal a line from Kenneth Burke, things are the signs of words.š Reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language stands as a pale refraction. I want to suggest, to play on the Gospel of St. John, that in the beginning was the word; words are not the names for things but, to steal a line from Kenneth Burke, things are the signs of words.š Reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language stands as a pale refraction.

    by James Carey     in Communication as Culture (1995), p. 25