What holds us together, improbably, may be probability in relation to language behavior that involves essentially repeated sounds that  develop shared symbolic meaning and exhibit more or less stability across the life of a language culture.

For me, all avenues in linguistics lead back to metonymy and the update, development, weighting, and evolution of clusters of behavior involving words, functional grammar, and, most important for our interests here, social grammar.  We’re not stuck with either the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty, i.e., the development of meaning may have predictable and stable qualities, but there seems much that is accidental and arbitrary in the development of culture and, by way of language, shared cultural perception.

Near unquestioned familiarity with a primary language affords a depth in humor and intuition generally unavailable in a second language. As instruments playing with words, we may be incredibly fine tuned, but that tuning depends on the continuation of conventions, habits, and practices — the more deeply held the assemblies, the less energy required to revisit and re-validate their adventageous qualities — any part of which may be subject to cultural and linguistic evolution.

I’ve never had much respect for the deconstructionists, their drift demonstrated so much more actively by poets who, depending on their mien, for better or worse, rearrange symbolic language relationships in the heads of those reading or hearing their inventions.