I'm glad that you, wiggi, and Steve (it would seem) concur on this. On the (mercifully few these days) occasions when I've thought about this, I've always had an intuition on the matter as you've framed it. It may date back to my vague memories of reading Bergson's Creative Evolution decades ago, since he deals with "The Idea of Nothing" at length.
A particularly relevant quote appears on p. 286:
The whole discussion is found in Chapter 4 of Creative Evolution (available for free online). I'm going to give it another read in the near future, but it's quite a head-fuck. I parted company with Bergson's philosophical basics ('Life-force' or Elan Vital) a long time ago, but I still think he says some illuminating things.
The one thing we have no example of is absolute nothing. We generally use the ideas of nothing as specific, as already covered, 'There is nothing on the table'. Once we expand that to an absolute then it's a language fuck as well as a mind fuck
It means we end up talking the existence, the time, and the space of absolute nothing,
