From 'Family Idiot, ii":
"The word 'mechanism' and the word 'ecstasy' - what are they" Things distinct in their very substance from the objects they pretend to designate."
This is the thought S. ascribes to Flaubert. It is in one sense an utterly child-like thought. Why should there be a fit between the molecular structure of language and the molecular stucture (this phrase is Sartre's) of the world/ reality?
Sartre's response is, it seems, that the question itself is false. Because the world itself is made by and inseparable from language. So, for example, the word 'mountain' throws into relief the mountain, retreives it from and sets it over against the indifferentiated continuum of 'background'. And the word does this because for certain human purposes it is useful, necessary, to be able to designate 'mountain'. The thing mountain and the word "mountain" exist in some kind of instrumental complex. It is not just that there is an order of things out there on the one hand, and an order of words on the other. As Sartre puts it, 'the actual is already verbal'.