The chapter likens William Burroughs’ symbiotic language ‘organism’ to linguist Noam Chomsky’s contemporaneous language ‘organ’, inferentially an encrypted sub-program in the developing genome. If Burroughs’ verbal symbiont implies a primeval merger at a genetic, or phylogenetic level, it also exhibits an uncanny “othering” of language, absent in Chomsky. Yet both thinkers contest the persistent, commonly held view that language is essentially communication – a vehicle or mechanism bearing a necessary relation to something outside of itself. Rather, both see it as radically inward facing. For Chomsky, language is a tool of thought; for Burroughs, a tool of thought control. Indeed, his word virus evinces an incipient model illustrating parallel forms of encrypted programming, as of an intellectual, psychological, or cybernetic order. The chapter also notes the significance and millennial fortunes of this suggestively Burroughsian paradigm in AI-regulated social media ecosystems, and its preservation in idioms in wide circulation today.