In a sense, language is a clumsy facsimile of the concepts we mean to express, in that we search for words to express the ideas in our minds rather than the other way around. By contrast, an image represents precisely the concept it depicts, by definition.

We forgot this about language by about the time of the Enlightenment era, when the intellectuals of the time thought that forcing everything to inhabit the structures of language (i.e., "rationality") represented the highest moral good one could achieve.