Language describes, but description tends to emerge precisely when nomenclature falters or when the names assigned to objects fail to render them adequately. The world almost never resembles its linguistic mugshot. Exposing the inadequacy of the world to compass the thing, description is allotted the thankless task of representing the misfit things that cannot be immediately assimilated to the world as we already know it. It thus serves as a heuristic device, as a virtual perspective that reveals something about out relationship to objects, or about the relationship between words and objects, that we cannot perceive in our everyday experience of them.