 For Rosenstock-Huessy, our temporal and purposeful nature is evident in our grammar and our institutions. Institutions are the embodiment and reproduction of a particular coalition of temporal forces. ‘Without a multiplicity of times’, he says ‘I remain speechless’ (1968, 12). Moreover, time and passion and history form an important connection which all come together in speech. Above all, time is experienced as history and this is as much so individually as collectively. History is not simply a sequential flow of forces which have their naturalistic counterparts. Rather, different events stamp themselves in the hearts and minds of a people and continue to impact upon a group long after their occurrence, thereby, at different times and to different degrees, activating passions of subsequent generations. Much of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work is devoted to the great ‘events’, the great catastrophes, and the time bodies ensuing from them which have given us our particular historical character. More generally, this activation of the passions by past events and the replacement of one pantheon of names by another—as a hateful future is replaced by the promise of one more venerable—is a fundamental aspect of world-making and it is ultimately why, for him, names are so important. Names are testimonies to events and, just as our speech is a means to activate us, they are the fundamental triggers of the passions and hence of our world making. Names are the testimonies of what we love, of what calls us to act or of what has become so hateful that new directions must be opened up and new names found. History is a great pantheon of names, names which are the registers of passions and total commitments past. When those names no longer em-passion then that component of a group’s history is dead.