As I made my way to my cubicle, I had one of the startled, queasy moments that sometimes came over me during my first years at Telligentsia. It was a feeling of displacement, the sense that I had landed in the middle of a newly forming planet where the laws of evolution were suddenly changed and unrecognizable. What was I doing surrounded by compulsive punners? By programmers who spent their time working in the cramped, stripped-down language of code? All around me, nothing but artificial languages: UNIX shell scripts and C programs and database queries asked in Structure Query Language—“impoverished languages” was the term I introduced to my students when I was a graduate teaching assistant. Artificial languages as poor human inventions stripped of history, usage, experience, connotation. All the dripping suggestiveness of language—gone. Around me an entirely new world was coming into being, and it was being made out of artificial, impoverished languages.