Is this a good explanation of what this thread tends to be about:

"the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames -- ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them." History in English Words is one of the relatively few attempts in our language to tell the history of peoples as revealed in these flickering word-shapes.

It's a quote by and a comment about Owen Barfield. And here is another one from the same website.

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow has written: We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. Free from what? From the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our "common sense." These, he convincingly argues, have produced a "world of outsides with no insides to them," a brittle surface world, an object world in which we ourselves are mere objects. It is not only what we perceive but also what we fail to perceive that determines the quality of the world we live in, and what we have collectively chosen not to perceive is the full reality of consciousness, the "inside" of everything that exists.
Click here

Helen http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/stevet/fdnc/appa.html