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an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?" (71). Compare this with the request to "Stand roughly here" (88).

20. Language is complicated. "Compare: inventing a game; inventing language; inventing a machine" (Zettel, 327 Cf. PI 492).

21. Can't we imagine shifting from game to game and also from language-game to language-game? (83).

22. For Wittgenstein the important thing about language is that "we remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything look alike" (p. 244e). Compare this with the analogy brought up earlier in 12: It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike.

23. In Zettel, Wittgenstein says "saying something is an activity" (671). What makes language, especially its analysis so complicated is that this is the case; and more. Compare what is said in 23 of the Investigations: "Here the term language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity." And think of how this relates to games which can also be both activities and part of an activity.

24. What points to this complicated nature of language in a more pronounced way is a topic which we can only hint at here, expressed in the Philosophical Grammar this way: "Is meaning then really only the use of a word? Isn't it the way this use meshes with our life? But isn't its use a part of our life?" (p. 65). Compare this with Zettel 173: "(Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning)." Now finally, compare this with what is said in the Philosophical Investigations: "the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (23). This helps clarify the problem in section 12 above: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (19).

25. Above all I do not want to fall into the trap that Wittgenstein continuously warns us about; the temptation to say "Language is...." To combat this temptation we should keep in mind the advice in 65: "instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, but that they are related to one another in many different ways."

26. The fundamental nature of language. Consider 491: "Not: 'Without language we could not communicate with one another' but for sure: without language we cannot influence other people in such-and-such ways; cannot build roads and machines etc. And also without the use of speech and writing people could not communicate."

27. What I have tried to do is construct a sign-post marking out several things. I have tried to highlight what is important to Wittgenstein about language-games. This sign-post is a direction for us to engage the text and Wittgenstein. "The sign-post is in order if, under normal circumstances, it fulfills its purpose"

28. Once I was accused of being "misled by ordinary language" in an academic paper. Come to think of it, this is possible. Isn't it?

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