 Rosenstock-Huessy complains that linguistics has followed philosophy in elevating the mind above speech, as if the mind itself is the real thinker and speech simply a rather poor means to get from a to b. (‘Fritz Mauthner wrote 6000 pages and proved in one and a half million words that all words lie’ (1962, Vol. 1, 554)). Such approaches to speech all follow what he calls ‘the abstract madness of the school grammar’, which makes the mistake of explaining ‘the last grammatical creation, the declarative sentence “these are”, as the beginning of speech.’ In fact, he says, a declarative sentence is: