The Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967) is known for his startling paintings that often double as philosophical riddles. One of his most stark and provocative works, The Treachery of Images (1929) is an exploration of meaning and language, juxtaposing an image of a pipe above the sentence ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ – French for ‘This is not a pipe.’ A reflection on the fraught nature of words, this video essay explores The Treachery of Images in the context of the work of the influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who argued that the relationship between an object and its name is arbitrary.