language as a lucifer-match is potential fire, but it is no
more language till it is in contact with a recipient mind, than a match
is fire till it is struck, and is being consumed.

A piece of music, again, without any words at all, or a song with words
that have nothing in the world to do with the ideas which it is
nevertheless made to convey, is often very effectual language. Much
lying, and all irony depends on tampering with covenanted symbols, and
making those that are usually associated with one set of ideas convey by
a sleight of mind others of a different nature. That is why irony is
intolerably fatiguing unless very sparingly used. Take the song which
Blondel sang under the window of King Richard's prison. There was not
one syllable in it to say that Blondel was there, and was going to help
the king to get out of prison. It was about some silly love affair, but
it was a letter all the same, and the king made language of what would
otherwise have been no language, by guessing the meaning, that is to say
by perceiving that he was expected to enter then and there into a new
covenant as to the meaning of the symbols that were presented to him,
understanding what this covenant was to be, and acquiescing in it.

On the other hand, no ingenuity can torture language into being a fit
word to use in connection with either sounds or any other symbols that
have not been intended to convey a meaning, or again in connection with
either sounds or symbols in respect of which there has been no covenant
between sayer and sayee. When we hear people speaking a foreign
language--we will say Welsh--we feel that though they are no doubt using
what is very good language as between themselves, there is no language
whatever as far as we are concerned. We call it lingo, not language. The
Chinese letters on a tea-chest might as well not be there, for all that
they say to us, though the Chinese find them very much to the purpose.
They are a covenant to which we have been no parties--to which our
intelligence has affixed no signature.

We have already seen that it is in virtue of such an understood covenant
that symbols so unlike one another as the written word "stone" and the
spoken word alike at once raise the idea of a stone in our minds. See
how the same holds good as regards the different languages that pass
current in different nations. The letters p, i, e, r, r, e convey the
idea of a stone to a Frenchman as readily as s