ABSTRACT
This is the point at which to return to my initial claim that speaking is akin to the practice of an art like singing or dancing. I do not mean art in its modern sense, a sense that has come to be opposed to technology as the spontaneous creation of novelty to the mechanical replication of pre-existing design (see Chapter Nineteen, pp. 349-50). I have in mind, rather, the traditional meaning of art as skill, of the kind we associate with craftsmanship – a sense preserved in such words as ‘artisan’ and ‘artefact’.
