Essential McLuhan 310 observed about the behavior of linguistic cliché or archetype can be found plentifully in the nonlinguistic world. Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (W.B.Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”) The human city in all its complexity of functions is thus “a center of paralysis,” a waste land of abandoned images. The clue that Yeats offers to the relation between the verbal and the nonverbal cliché and archetype is, in a word, “complete.” The most masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process begins anew. Language is a technology which extends all of the human senses simultaneously. All the other human artifacts are, by comparison, specialist extensions of our physical and mental faculties. Written language at once specializes speech by limiting words to one of the senses. Written speech is an example of such specialism, but the spoken word resonates, involving all the senses. The ancient saying, “Speak that I may see thee,” was a popular way of citing this integral and inclusive quality of the spoken word. If the world of kettles and bottles and broken cans and the world of commerce and money in the till are fragmentary specialisms of man’s powers, it becomes easier to see the bond that remains between verbal and nonverbal cliché or archetype. The specialist artifact form has the advantage over language of intensification and amplification far beyond the limits of word or phrase. The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché—an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment. The following are examples of archetypes which have been chosen to stress the normal tendency of a cliché to cross-quote from one technology to another: a flagpole flying a flag a cathedral adorned by a stained-glass window pipeline carrying oil cartoon with a caption