These words! --they come falling free;
speech: daft here, deft there,
in that old, linking tongue.
We take these precious signs and tones,
play them on our organs grand,
sing them in our voices strong--
yet spoken in our poor, restricted speech,
we find them dulled again.
So hear ye of this simple speech,
and grasp it phrase for phrase;
key words to link the harmony,
re-form the dictum true:
The first, the object--
abstract; a guide without a muse.
By itself lives unrestricted,
but here we find it,
linked and woven in.
The second, the tongue--
morphing; with an effortless building
of an ethereal wind;
here one moment, gone the next,
sent ever on its merry way.
The third, the tongue itself--
waiting on society lost,
but alas!-- we blinked,
and now it is dead.
The fourth, the death of wind--
pushing; with a quiet passing.
The spread that does not stop,
until it breaks on us,
and ends its blink of life.
The fifth, the deep--
revelation; a formative thought.
Passing without trace,
but leaving the hint of discovery.
So bring ye of these keys and tones,
enmesh them! string them well.
Then bring them to their linking tongue,
to build the dictum true.
And it should matter not from here,
if mind be bent or broke;
for spoken in the linking tongue,
lo, even Madmen earn respect.
A hint, should you need it:
Unless you've encountered the phrase already, or are very familiar with language, you may not be able to easily find the full, correct answer without the aid of a search engine. You should be able to get pretty dang close, though, unless I've messed up difficulty.
Answer
I am not awfully sure, but I think the answer may be:
the popular quote: "Anything said in Latin sound profound", or its Latin equivalent "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur". This RationalWiki page contains a variation of this quote.
The first, the object--
abstract; a guide without a muse.
By itself lives unrestricted,
but here we find it,
linked and woven in.
"Anything"- refers to an indefinite abstract object, without explicitly naming it. Usually it refers to any object (unrestricted), but here it is deeply related to the rest of the sentence.
The second, the tongue--
morphing; with an effortless building
of an ethereal wind;
here one moment, gone the next,
sent ever on its merry way.
"said (in ?)" - It means the speech (generated by the tongue), that we almost effortlessly create in the air every now and then, and then it fades away (unless written down or otherwise recorded).
The third, the tongue itself--
waiting on society lost,
but alas!-- we blinked, and now it is dead.
"Latin" - The dead tongue (language).
The fourth, the death of wind--
pushing; with a quiet passing.
The spread that does not stop,
until it breaks on us,
and ends its blink of life.
"Sounds"- sound is created by an agitation in the air, which propagates through the air and finally reaches us to be heard.
The fifth, the deep--
revelation; a formative thought.
Passing without trace,
but leaving the hint of discovery.
"profound"- deep, having (or appearing to have) some sublime significance. Not quite sure about this part.
So bring ye of these keys and tones, them! string them well. Then bring them to their linking tongue, to build the dictum true.
Now joining them together, we get the sentence "Anything said in Latin sound profound", and converting to the 'linking tongue' (Latin), we get its more popular variant "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."
And it should matter not from here, if mind be bent or broke; for spoken in the linking tongue, lo, even Madmen earn respect.
That's what the sentence means.
Interestingly enough,
this sentence appears in the chat profile of the OP.
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