William S. Burroughs and the 'Language Virus'

In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:

My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.