Your linguistic analysis always stimulates me, being a self-proclaimed lover of language but having scarcely the kind of intimacy with the rules that you have. But I wonder if your analysis, along with the observational self-consciousness it heralds, isn't more similar to the other person's staunch refusal to self-examine, isn't another way of getting distance from the raw place (or places) for which there are no words, or no words that will change anything anyway. I don't know. My thoughts are unpleasant spaghetti today. But I'm having fun imagining what the Great Thistle Patch could be...