the difference between the real world and imaginary ones is one of the more important attainments to which you could possibly aspire. Because that understanding can free you from what Stuart Chase called the "tyranny of words."

Let me see if I can give you that understanding.

First: Nothing can exist for you unless you're aware of it.

Second: What you're aware of can exist in either of two places — outside your mind or within it.

Third: If it exists outside your mind, it's a thing. If it exists within your mind, it's something you're imagining.

Fourth: If it's a thing, it can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled. If it's something you're imagining, it cannot.

And fifth: Because it can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled, a thing is known to all. Which means that it exists in what we call the real world.

Conversely, because it can't be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelled, something you're imagining cannot be known to all. Which means that it doesn't exist in the real world; it exists only in an imaginary one.

Now here's the payoff.

Words are symbols. And whatever it is that a given word is intended to represent is its referent.

Now, keeping in mind the difference between the real world and imaginary ones, please consider that not one of the words that is setting American against American today — such as right-wing, left-wing, political correctness, racism, corporate America, affirmative action, greed, liberalism, conservatism, the politics of meaning, glass ceiling, multiculturalism, and on and on and on — has a referent that exists in the real world; they all exist in imaginary ones.

Good Heavens, have the inmates taken over the asylum?

Think about it.