Here are the words and I want to be protected against them
Because everyone of them hides under its coat a dead child
And its face is awfully flowered with a moustache and a pair of spectacles.
Because the worst on the world is a word: said or unsaid.
Don't let her come, that Chinese word, yellow and yellow;
That Speranto word, camaleonian like the League of Nations;
That Spanish word that sounds to western ears like the tiny bell of a mission church in San Francisco.
They all have a dirty color;
the Russian words, -- spotted like the bloody snow;
the French ones, -- napkins with drops of wine and honey;
the iron-oxide German ones;
the Italian mandoline's strings of rotten sound,
and these English words, -- good for all that means movement, but life!
Throw them away, and give to man the right to speak his own language, yet unknown.
Take from me the whole lexicon. Cut from my tongue any tongue.
And, this afternoon, let me see the pictures of the white book of Silence.
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