The traditional model of how language works has it communicate thoughts from one mind to another. There is no assurance, indeed it can hardly be believed, that the thoughts thus transmitted are the same in both minds. FregeFrege, Gottlob, the mythical father of analytic philosophy, made the cavalier assumption that thoughts exist on their own, in a realm distinct from both that of ideas and that of outer things, and people (minds) just grasp them, without explaining what such grasping amounts to. For being a father of an illustrious philosophical movement, he certainly moved awkwardly around issues, including language, which was at the same time his main tool and something he declared to be constantly struggling against—without learning any lessons from the persistence of this struggle. In my view, the direction to take is not from thought to language but the other way. Thought belongs to the constitution of a private sphere: a sphere, that is, to which the public is deprived, denied, access, as an additional safety measure against too early and too risky dissemination of playful content. But private thoughts are friable: just like dreams, they are quickly forgotten. Ways must be found to fix them, for example on paper; and, as soon as that happens, they become potentially public again, and the public can encroach on them. The whole universe of concealing and discovering, of ciphering and deciphering, finds its rationale, and its huge philosophical significance, here.