This book aims to shift the focus from the instrumental to the symbolic dimensions of language that account for its awesome power to affect people’s view of themselves and the world. It takes a post-structuralist approach to the study of language – language not, as Dwight Bolinger wrote in 1980, as a loaded and potentially dangerous weapon, but as a discourse with symbolic effects. The chapter defines symbolic power as “the power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming their vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world” (Bourdieu 1991) by mobilizing not only their minds but also their emotions, beliefs, memories, imaginations and aspirations. It will therefore revisit some of the mainstays of language study that are usually taught as linguistic and discourse structures and show how these structures are vectors of a symbolic power that manifests itself in all areas of everyday life from boardrooms to classrooms to courtrooms. It will show the fundamentally paradoxical nature of symbolic power that at once enhances individual language users’ ability to act upon the world through the use of symbols, and limits their ability to do so in order to be seen as legitimate members of the group that speaks that language.