Quoting John Young (jya@pipeline.com):
Psychological and psychiatric catergories are entertaining to toy with, and the diagnostic manuals are a hoot, but none are as subtle and supple as language needs to be to convey what people do, believe, say and act. They are way too rigid and domineering to get at the complexity and unpredictability of human behavior. But simple-seeking minds are soothed by them.
More to the point, such systems provide the imprecision and convenience which some rigid and domineering minds need in order to impose their more subtle and complex belief systems on others.
Similarly, grammatical language is pitifully limited in what it can communicate, and its adherents must bully their message to say what they cannot so long as they abide by the rigidity of a highly conventional structure, not of their own making, not even of their understanding as to what can be done contradicting the ever challengable conceits of grammar's illusory supremacy.
Only by convention.
Fortunately, there are numerous creative alternatives to rigid, authoritarian language as in all arts and sciences.
Which are only useful if they are used as creative alternatives instead of forms within which convenient and common ideas can be re-expressed.
Alternatives which the conventionally obedience ever attempt to demonize and castigate with simian terms of opprobrium. Psychoanalysis a prime tool, literary criticism another. Plain language philosophy, too, idolizes word structure, the false hegemon of the dictionary.
Beware of false dictionaries and lexicons.
Any more of this kind of shit writing belabors the obvious point that serious writing, along with serious thinking, is ridiculous, a conceit of mind and tongue unable to bear frightful freedom, afraid of its own yearning for disorderly structure as though there is something wrong with singing your heart out, and laughing at your tone deafness.
Intellectual freedom and speech is only as good as the persons who excercise it -- and in this culture, it is mediocre at best.
A joke beats a wise statement any day of the week for content, style and performance.
But of course for effect the statesman's sage utterings are unequalled.
An unintended joke is a masterstroke. If it is upon oneself that is sublime. Take God's own case, a sublime lack of humor about the predicament sui generis.
You're losing it.
Nobody here has ever gone that far, though the best ones vainmostly aspire.
Or pretend. Regards, Steve -- Witness those little white men practising their alibis. -- Dean Russell