A realistic painting of a tobacco pipe with the words This is not a pipe written beneath it creates an immediate mental short circuit, and that is exactly what René Magritte intended. This episode explores The Treachery of Images, painted in 1929 and now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from its modest, flash-card-like scale to Magritte's unanswerable defense that you cannot stuff a painted pipe with tobacco, so calling it a pipe would have been a lie.

We place the painting inside the December 1929 issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, where Breton and Éluard mocked Paul Valéry's line that poetry is a survival by declaring that poetry is a pipe, and where Magritte published Words and Images alongside photographs of surrealists with their eyes closed. We then connect the work to Korzybski's principles that the word is not the thing and ...