The point I am trying.

Anyone reading the text of "Chronic Meanings" by Bob Perelman would be amused by its adoption of a poetic format to enumerate, in an archival sort of way, the contents of what we still consider common and modern linguistic idiom.*

I cannot ignore the feeling that Perelman is just behind me watching as I write with the same expressions from a linguistic or literary repertoire he has so amusingly and sharply parodied. For what he has listed and played with are some of the fossils of our discursive library, semiotic artifacts that we pass around, whose age we are not often too conscious about.

By a method of suspension and fragmentation, the text forces us to reconsider the form and the syntax, but at the same time makes us aware of the way we process our thoughts into the meanings we find ourselves habitually supplying. For example, the line "The point I am trying." would usually need "to make" to complete it idiomatically, and doing differently would require justification in context or signal some attempt to call our attention to its (mis)construction and strangeness.

By underlining the facility by which we supply the missing parts of the equation (or quotation), Perelman redefines reading as a game of paleontology where language use completes itself pathologically via formulaic artifacts of meaning.

However, by fragmenting, by coupures, by the suppression of the remainder, by the suspension of syntax, the text also implies, predictably, inevitably, the ludic refusal of fossilized idiom. There may never be absolute escape from this library, even with neologism, especially when the most common is also the most useful and transparency is defined in terms of familiarity, but at least we can understand how dinosaurs worked when they still existed.

(*In theater, you will remember Ionesco, and how the meanings of expressions, truisms, sayings, factoids, logical threads, etc. seem to strip away, by dumb repetition, from the dry shell of language.)