Faldage and I will be out of pocket for a while, but I wanted to leave this think-piece to come back to.

When I was growing up, it used to bother me no end that the impressionistic painting of life I was experiencing was systematically hived into little boxes, for greater understanding, by my parents and my teachers. I clearly remember being synęsthetic then; by the time I was 10 that was gone.

In college, as I made my way through linguistic theory, I was struck by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the very idea that the words we use could influence our perceptions. At the same time, I was grappling with brand-name religion, yet another (to my mind) way of categorizing phenomena to make them easier to deal with. (sorry, I don't mean this to be a religion thread!! Just another example of how we understand life)

I've come to accept that categories and patterns can be good, useful things. So now I'm wondering: wordminstrel has classified Faldage as both a fastidious and as an evangelical grammarian, thereby (to my mind) neatly compartmentalizing him into a single, one-dimensional, easy-to-understand box.

Wordminstrel, do you have such sobriquets for any of the rest of us? And does this help with understanding?

Anyone else like to comment on this apparent need of ours to compartmentalize?