From the outside, looking in?
“Some of the clearest pictures of the universe ever taken,” said the BBC announcer this evening, talking about the latest high-definition astronomical photographs. He didn’t explain how the cameraman actually got outside the universe to take them, nor how they managed to get a lens of sufficiently wide an angle to encompass the whole thing.
You might find my reaction to the sloppy use of English somewhat over the top, but I feel that if we continue to have a cavalier attitude to what words actually mean, we will eventually find ourselves in Babel.