The utilitarian vision of an ordinary language perfectly mapped upon the material needs of the everyday is a vision of language before the Fall: speaking from the heart or from nature as the vox populi is mythically able to do. Thus the folk are seen to rise in one voice because of their lack of consciousness of difference. Such theories of language can be placed amid other Western cults of the primitive: the celebration of madness in romanticism and modernism, the cult of the child, the cult of the pastoral — cults that have never been held by the mad, the child, or the folk themselves.
Not once in that whole passage does she say that words are never ever adequate. It is not an indictment against language but against fools.
And so for day 137
30.04.2007