Language is a highly-structured relational con whose functional goal is endless abstractive conquest of human consciousness and whose primary social transport is culture. Its most virulent function is to replace awareness with tokens, and its draw is the power to grant formal recognition to features of experience and relationships which would otherwise be nearly impossible to detect or manipulate. The trade seems reasonable, superficially. In fact, it is not impossible for the process of acquisition to comprise a gift; but it is rare. More often, this relationship is essentially parasitic from the start, and the common person’s relationship with language becomes increasingly debilitating over time due to underlying ignorance and misapprehensions about the implicit dangers of abstraction, coupled with inadequate familiarity with rhetoric, and logic.

Problematically, the forms and capacities of the innate intelligence we are born with are a thousandfold more powerful than what we usually end up acquiring with them through cultural transmission. And what we acquire replaces them with abstraction strategies, almost completely, and usually permanently. Although it’s rare, there are those who manage to overcome the monumental authority language’s structure and functions come to represent.

The broadest class of such heroes are children, who implicitly (if informally) suspect that language is a con from the get-go because ‘it’s part of what is wrong with adults’. Next, perhaps are those who bring this understanding into their creative relationship with art, and, paradoxically, we find certain poets in the forefront of this cadre. Comedians are perennially extending a hacker’s playful insight into language’s failings as a form of mutual play. Then, somewhat onerously, we have philosophers. And lastly, those who have gone mad, and these are often the peculiar progeny of the underlying propensity for language’s power and activity to essentially take over (and largely replace) our minds.