dead words butterflies

This started as an illustration Friday piece and sort of grew from there. The word of the week was "canned" which I didn't like at all, but it did made me think of those animals and insects that are preserved in formaldehyde, and how, preservation of something, often destroy it, not because the thing itself is gone, but because the meaning and the use of them is gone, and so a beautiful spontaneous and very fragile thing, like a butterfly, or even a spoken word sometime, becomes useless when it's dead in a box or written down in a book.