Theresa and I had a meandering discussion today at ABC, and she suggested that I try and share it here. I don't particularly feel up to a full version, but I'll go for a bit.

As I gird my, um, brains in preparation for writing my book, and read more and more language theory, I become increasingly aware of the extent to which language formation is a direct and conscious act of common communication and reasoning.

Consider my favorite whipping boy, the grade-school essay, or GSE, for short. This very primitive, crappy form of the essay contains some incredibly predictable parts:

1. The Introduction, which lists the Thesis, and describes its relationship with the three supporting points.
2. The First Supporting Point.
3. The Second Supporting Point.
4. The Third (or Final) Supporting Point.
5. The Conclusion, which re-lists the Thesis, and re-describes its relationship with the three supporting points.

Everyone has read an essay like this, and most people have written one. These essays are terrible, but they serve a great purpose: they permit people with limited time (teachers); to teach people with limited time, education, and frankly, interest (students); to structure and communicate a new idea (the students opinion of George Washington vis-a-vis Bart Simpson) using a form which is so readable to others that they have a chance of understanding the argument.

I love the GSE, it is a very useful Idiom. If you've read one, you've read hundreds. In fact, most people only ever really developed three or four arguments, which they used over and over again.

That's important though, that's a feature. While the idea of the GSE is an idiom, a particular instance of a GSE is a deliberate, self-referential description of a four-way preposition, describing the relationship between four abstract ideas: the thesis and three supporting points. And once you've seen a description of this prepositional relationship (read the essay), you can re-apply it to other sets of abstract ideas.

Though we think it is simple, the GSE is a rather sophisticated form for the production of abstract arguments, or prepositions. It is a form of language formation, which brings me to the thesis of this essay: Kinda like making up new words to save time, for instance: GSE.