98 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
of “slew/ 7 I may write “elws. 77 But, as I elsewhere sought to 
show (Hybrids p. 131), the hearer and the speaker must reset 
in mind all sentences that thus are out of joint, before he can 
correctly sense intended meaning. Apparently there Is accord¬ 
ingly no genuine exception to this law: What the speaker 
thinks of as the actor, he begins with in the active sentence (i. e. 
one whose verb is in the active voice). 
If accordingly the ante-passive language-user, thinking of 
a given act and its participants—for instance those exhibited 
in “Robinson struck Brown 77 — begins with Brown, the mental 
habit formed in long employment of the active voice develops 
a well-nigh insuperable tendency to think of Brown in the 
usual way as somehow still the actor in the given action. That 
is, the law of action-thinking that I formulated just above, Is 
operative in its converse aspect. What the speaker begins with 
in the active sentence he will think of as the actor, even though 
it he the actual actee. 
Suppose I start accordingly with Brown (the actual actee) 
conceived, however, as the actor, and continue with the act of 
striking; the place of the actee (or person struck) invites an 
occupant. If Brown is somehow actor, Robinson might be 
expected somehow correspondingly to figure as actee; and, with 
all its violence, an imaging of just this sort sometimes occurs, 
although, so far as I have noticed, only farcically, as in “Brown 
struck Robinson on the fist with his eye. 77 Except, however, 
when expression strains at wit, the sentence “Brown struck 
Robinson 77 can be regarded as intelligible, only in the flattest 
contradiction of the given fact. Furthermore, to say that 
Brown struck Smith or Jones or anyone thus far unmentioned, 
is irrelevant to fact. On the other hand, the figurative state¬ 
ment that he struck himself, as I shall argue, can be reconciled 
with fact—by piecing out—and even can be made intelligible 
as a statement of the fact. To give however to the evolution 
of so figurative an expression any plausibility, I need another 
illustration—one which virtually will compel the mind to the 
complete conception of a figurative self-infliction. Such an 
illustration waits me ready-made—achieved by one of those un- 
