• Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

    James Thurber: Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other
    1961 Of English. Lanterns and Lances,'Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dreams'.