“Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue’, Barker recounts. For Burroughs, language is a ‘parasitic organism’ that possesses the speaker’s nervous system. ‘The word’, Burroughs characteristically wrote, ‘has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host’; and we have ‘no way of ascertaining’ the invasion in such cases of ‘latent virus infections’.

Words propagate through us, we do not make them, they are self-selective and thus have interests of their own, not necessarily coincident with ours. ‘Viruses make themselves real. It’s a way viruses have’. Thus, inspired by the research of the largely forgotten scientist Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz, Burroughs pieced together a detailed ‘linguistic virology’ and ‘viral linguistics’. He liked to remark that language isn’t something you decide to do, it is something that happens to you; it doesn’t belong to you, and it never will.

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. […] You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. In the beginning was the word."

(Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History by Thomas Moynihan)