Elvis está vivo, me lo dijo un amigo

"Perhaps the most profound indication that a radical shift in the understanding of culutre was taking place--and, hence, a shift in the sense of man's relation to the world and to himself--can be seen in the Renaissance crisis of language, that basic instrument in the formation of culture. The first sign of that crisis was a growing uneasiness, at first among the most abstract thinkers but then more broadly, that the human vocabulary was failing to mirror the objective world. Words, it was widely lamented, no longer corresponded to things. This lament was often taken to mean that the vocabulary should be reformed so that this traditional identity could be restored: a demand, in effect, for a return to the dependence of culture upon external nature. But then an alternative solution to the problem began to unfold. Skepticism about the capacity of the human mind to grasp the structures of nature directly led to growing doubt about the possibility of such an identiy, to a recognition of the conventionality of language and its susceptibility to change, to the perception of language as a human creation, and eventually to the conclusion that, as the creator of language, man also shapes through language the only world he can know directly, including even himself."
--William J. Bouwsma, "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History."

When I was a kid, the word "ladder" used to give me metaphysical crises.