She took another breath, and loosened her grip on the podium; she was beginning to understand what she was doing, and the panic was subsiding.

ÒIn linguistics and anthropology, which are more closely related than we would sometimes like them to beÉÓ The audience laughed appreciatively. ÒÉwe can find a similar array of motivations, because language is at once one of the greatest mysteries of our nature, and one of the most common sources of confusion and pitfalls in our thinking. As with psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, we come into our profession for personal reasons Ð to remedy some personal wreckage on the shoals of misunderstood language, or to help clarify the peculiar nature of our species, or perhaps to penetrate the mysteries of why we speak at all, and where the limits are in the juxtapositions between our amazing capacity for factual or fictional or other-worldly thought and our ability to wield language in describing it.

"As far as we have come as a profession, and as much as we have accomplished in understanding the array of phenomena associated with human languages, their families and relationships, their subtle morphemic structures, and their intricate cross-pollinations through time, there is without doubt or question, in my view, a great deal more that we do not know, and may even not know how to ask.Ó

She had them.

The audience had stopped whispering and clinking their dishes, and she could feel their attention on her as though she had fired off a pistol in the middle of a party.