Language Requires a Common Frame of Experience

The greatest is obsolescence, the meaning of something evocative changing because the players’ reality has changed since the inspiration entered it. William Gibson’s ground-breaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer begins, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Supporting details make it clear that this is an industrial port at night, the sky gray from pollution and flecked with ash and other debris. But that was an image published in 1984. A decade...