The Invention of Drawing – Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1787 A woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall – representation born not from the thing itself, but from its absence, its drift. The first sign is already a derivative, a second-order trace. A perfect emblem of meaning emerging from instability. Most language instruction treats meaning as stable – a word points to a thing, a phrase maps to an intention, a metaphor resolves into a tidy equivalence. Yet real

Harmony, Remedios Varo, 1956 T he surreal mechanical-organic fusion captures how disparate cognitive elements must be woven together during creative language production, creating unexpected harmonies. We have engineered modern language learning into a fortress of predictability. Every answer has its rubric, every structure its template, every ambiguity its resolution. Advanced learners navigate English with remarkable technical competence yet remain trapped in what linguists