From “Business of Design”, a section of David Barringer’s excellent book There’s nothing funny about design:

Definitions

Quality of life depends on quality of mind, which depends on quality of language. Heightened experience requires both practiced sensory perception and the vocabulary with which to render its significance to yourself and others.

To convey impressions of your own experience to others, you are often bound to language as the flatbed truck for that conveyance, even when your experience is not linguistic or textual but visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory.

To savor experience you must define experience, and definitions involve the abuse of words.

It is for future designers to convey odors that summarize a poem, sounds that describe the texture of a touch, and images that define an odor.

To enhance your perception, you must exercise your imagination. Expand the control room of your mind to include maps of the surrounding dimensions of experience, as measured and reduced by sight, sound smell, touch, etc. Construct these maps in leisure, with fine concentration, to guide your judgments in times of haste and fury.

I love that first paragraph for its similarity to previous musings on self, language and consciousness.