Oh, I should give it up, I knew. I was stuck in a nineteenth-century idea of the Real and the True, which I should confine to my journal writing and poetry scribbling. There I could indulge my tiresome need for the Essential and the Transcendent—for all those philosophical German words that began with capital letters—without bothering too many people about them. I’d been a student of James McCawley, the linguist who insisted on the study of meaning, not just syntax and structure. It had ruined my academic career, according to my dissertation advisor. “The future is in computational linguistics,” he’d insisted, by which he’d meant the math of words, the formalism of language, the deduction of elemental parts of speech, like atom-splitting. When done well, the advisor insisted, computational linguistics would eventually eliminate the difference between natural and artificial language. You won’t know if you’re talking to a human being or a program, and you won’t care. “You should go into computer speech-recognition research,” the advisor had advised.