The essay began with a word that English cannot hold, and that difficulty is not a preface to the argument but part of it. Language is the first medium of becoming: the tongue in which a person is named, mourned, governed, and granted or refused the standing of one who knows. This research strand takes language, translation, and aesthetic form as conditions of flourishing in their own right. It studies the politics of which languages are permitted to theorise and which are received only as raw material; the labour and the loss of translation across South Africa's many official languages and beyond; and the archives of becoming carried in praise poetry, the novel, the image, the song, and the made and worn object. It asks what law and policy still fail to hear when they attend to the propositional and never to the poetic, and it convenes the linguist, the translator, the literary scholar, and the artist not as commentators upon flourishing but as among its theorists.