I am one of those people who is fussy about language. I don't mean people cussing, I mean language as a tool for communicating thoughts and ideas between humans. How we use words. I am a pedantic old fart.
I use colloquialisms and various similes, allegories, and snark - but

3. We need a form of interaction which is about exchanging clear concepts. All we have to do that with is words. We need to - must - agree on meaning at some level.
The depth, the subtlety, the clarity with which complex subjects can be understood by one another is based on word

4. I often use as an example the word "awesome."
Awesome had a specific meaning. One rarely heard it in a sentence. But modern society feels the need to overstate everything, to inflate everything. We act like Donald Trump's speech patterns were unusual. He is America.

5. There's not a writing instructor or professor alive who would allow you to use "nice" as a descriptor.
Emphasis. Salesmanship. These sneakers will make you feel just exactly like watching a full moon rise out of the Atlantic Ocean from an isolated wild oceanfront.
They won't.

6. And in fact we no longer have a word in American English for the feeling the above described experience would give me. A holy experience. A sacred experience. An awesome experience.
Awesome doesn't mean anything anymore.

7. The shit world that blazing fast industrialism is creating has to be given ownership of all the superlatives which once described experiences, mostly, with nature at her finest, or human creation at its finest, the greatest riff, the most perfect lyric sung the most perfectly

8. Reality.
Reality TV.
I hope the person who invented the phrase reality TV roasts on the hottest griddle in Hell.
The link between word and meaning is automatic in our brains. You listen to albums? You know how, when one song ends, you hear the next one before it starts? Links.

9. I will tell you, as a writer who has chosen this medium, that when people hear the word "reality" the echo inside their brains goes, "TV."
That's how they respond on Twitter. I talk about reality, as in walking on Earth, and Reality TV will be in the responses. Linkage.

10. PTSD. Poor Joy Reid has PTSD because she sat in some room as a big shot reporter.
I'm not going to attempt to explain what an insult that it. Take my word for it.
PTSD has been turned into jargon for "I had a really shitty day."
OK bye.

11. If the world y'all live in is so damn good, why can't it stand in its reality and be expressed in regular speech.
People made it up to 200 years ago at the speed humans move, and over all those tens, hundreds, of thousands of years, evolved language.

12. By thousands of years ago we had evolved language sufficient to share with one another subtle experience, reasoned theory - we have their writings. Shakespeare had language available to him to express great detail of action and thought.

13. Language has always evolved, but I am not aware of an event where a language's superlatives and expressions of extremity all vanished into everyday use to describe everyday events.
Everyday life is not awesome, glorious, and wonderful. Not here, and I've got it good.

14. We are an immodest people, braggarts, exaggerators, given to describe things as more than they are.
"Hoverboards."
We do know what it is to hover, correct?
Or what it used to be.
Just as every speed has to be faster and every computer must be obsolete next season,

15. every description of every event must be more exciting, more overstated, more hyperbolic, than the one yesterday on the same cable news channel.
Just as our ecosystem becomes cruder and cruder, less subtle and varied, so does our language.

16. To see Trump as the exception is an error. Not to say we won't get well in November / January, and elect Joe Biden, Certified Human Being and all-around Good Guy, with brilliant and incredibly competent Kamala Harris as ...

17. You're probably familiar with the question, "Do you want the man in charge or the woman who runs the place?"
Her. She'll be Veep.
But Trump wasn't an accident. He is the perfect expression of the dominant American culture.
Beautiful, he's a beautiful example. It's beautiful

18. Words make up a form of thought. It's a complex topic. My dad had his first stroke at 52 and had near-total aphasia for the rest of his life, about 35 more years.
He had no words, but he could think.
His form of aphasia took all his nouns and verbs. Poof. Gone.

19. He could speak, physically. He could say hello, goodbye, yes and no. He could say, "Hey!" which was by default my mother's name for, as I said, 35 years.
He could say the entire Lord's Prayer. It was obviously stored in a different brain location than the rest of speech.

20. But he could still think. For the first years, slowly fading but only after a long time, he'd say, "Hey. I think... that..." but he couldn't say it. The words were gone. He would get horribly frustrated, eventually shake his head, say "nah."
So he wasn't thinking in words.

21. And I don't, entirely. When I envision something like this it's not words. I see it, and I can draw it and make it, but I don't have any words for it.

22. But what I do here as a writer is entirely about words. Regular readers know that I attempt to the best of my ability to express thoughts and ideas clearly and understandably. From responses, I know I'm not batting 1,000.
Or 500.
Oh well. Embrace imperfection.

23. The hole in my brain is almost right where the speech center is, but on the most important day of my life I was lucky. My speech remained to me. I ask no more.
Just rambling. Later.