Submitted by Robin on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 15:56.
The argument put forth by Magritte in Les trahison des images* seems to me an unnecessarily pedantic one. I may be giving my fellow human beings too much credit, but I am fairly certain that everyone realizes that you cannot actually smoke a picture of a pipe (at least, not in the same way that the pictured pipe would be smoked). To say that the verb "to be" can only be used in the context of strict one-to-one relationships between the noun and the actual, physical object it represents robs language of its rich complexity. Metaphor and hyperbole become impossible – if the drawing of the pipe is not a pipe, then all the world is definitely not a stage, and it was almost certainly neither the best of times nor the worst of times. read more »
