Pipe

I had an interesting tutorial today.
Some of it I did not quite listen to much, as I was browsing the wonderful and desirable world of asos. But, some I caught when, plagued by a niggling feeling of guilt at being the only one with a laptop, indeed shut my laptop.
My literature tutor (who, incidentally, is quite the sort of 50+ person I would like to resemble. And I always think this: this is a reoccuring thought. She dresses really, a little hip(ster)/sophisticated and wears nice shirts that I could never pull off now. And her hair is grey, not some faux (this is the word of the day, kids) other colour, and the length I am considering cutting mine to now (but am too scared. See previous blog post on fear). And she has so many words always spilling from her mouth: oh! to be so eloquent and educated) was talking about words.
To paraphrase Shakespeare/Hamlet: Words words words
She was talking about the evolution of language, and how, initially, things existed, and then say, Adam, put a name to them (spoken or written or whatever you like), and then they belonged to that category. We do not need the thing to exist anymore once the word for that thing exists. Or an image or a photograph. A photograph of a particular thing is a representation of that particular thing. This was the point of Rene Magritte, a Belgian surrealist artist who said: this is not a pipe. To the viewer, it may appear to be a pipe above the caption but, of course, it is merely an image of aforementioned pipe.
Gotcha.