I was fascinated with language from an early age. It was like a universe of its own, within the human universe.

But I quickly realized that the adults »were using it in ways that were pathological. Back then, I presumed the adults somehow ‘knew want they were doing’, but even with that supposition, their behavior in language often appeared extremely confused… outright wrong, confusing… or like a disease.

I vowed to remember this, and change it, in the world, as an adult, presuming I would get there. But, like most of us, I forgot at least half of it… because I was no longer in the child-way of being.

Later, I would experience a kind of rebirth… and then I could remember… but even before that, I remembered a few things that stood out.

Generalizations: Adults made generalizations that were actually simply wrong, constantly. They grouped together and treated as ‘the same thing/being’ things and beings that could not be reasonably addressed this way.

World-view: The adults had models of the world that were (and still are) patently absurd — not only did they »not make sense, they made the opposite of sense. And the more this was true, the more militant many adults became when declaring these models as ‘hard facts’. They never were. They were mere »perspectives (that resulted, of course, in behaviors ‘in their name’)… and many of them were both malignant and contagious.

Theory of Mind: Adults often treated me as though I had been or was thinking things that were actually impossible for me to have been thinking. I was a child; I wasn’t merely »in another universe than they were, sensorially, participatorially… I »was another universe. My mind was nothing like their theories, but they kept insisting that it was, had to be, »and ‘I must be lying’. In fact, they invented ways for me to be lying that, again, were actually impossible.

Words Tell You What They Mean: Adults used language explicitly in ways that were nonsensical to me (and still are). As if mere statements were laws, absolutely literal and explicit, concrete, facts. None of that was ever true. It was the way the »used language, not the language itself, that created this problem.

There were a hundred others. But these stand out, and I spent huge parts of my life learning to both understand and resolve such problems… first for myself (and much of this involved deep linguistic creativity, poetry, experiment), and then for others who were interested.

I still walk the path of trying to understand our relationships with language and representational cognition in general. I have learned truly astonishing things… books worth, but there are very few (if any) non-academic contexts in which I can share and develop these insights.

Language is a bit like an actually haunted house, where the ghosts of old perspectives, ‘traditions’, and habits… swarm around seeking new bodies and minds to invade, dominate… and largely ruin.

Sure, there are exceptions. I don’t have to worry about those, they will take care of themselves — and I can learn from them.

I worry, however, for the common people, the children, the elderly, and those who might have had amazing, creative lives… if not for the bizarre world of language and it’s commonly disease-like capacity to spread damage while pretending this is insight, truth, facts — or even plausible.