The Active Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch

You've probably not met The Active Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch. Maybe she's alive and well on a planet in the constellation Andromeda, we don't know for sure and humility prompts us to realize that there are a few corners of the universe we've not yet visited. But she has such a charming name that, in a serendipitous mood, we might be half-convinced that she is quite real. In any case, a book for children was written about her, but unlike many related texts it does not purport to be anything other than fiction. Fiction often overlaps with fanciful abstractions and the real and unreal are intricately interwoven. We know that many abstract words are only "shadows hiding a vacuum." And what we know about the The Active Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, is an abstraction pieced together from things that we do have knowledge of.

The root meaning of the word "abstract" is to "draw away," in essence to draw away from the things physical, concrete, and specific. If one were aspiring to things spiritual, this would seem, at first thought, to be a good idea. But some mentally unhealthy conditions are also characterized by withdrawal from the world. So what are the differences between the benign metaphysician and the neurotic?

One difference, semantically defined, is what we might call word/reality split. It is the disunion between the words and the things or realties that they stand for. Often, we listen to someone using high-level abstract words, and we don't know what they're talking about. In such case, there are at least two possibilities: either our experience is too limited or uneducated for comprehension, or they actually don't know what they're talking about.

"When a communicator becomes stuck on his high level of abstraction his discourse is often characterized by vagueness, ambiguity, and even meaninglessness. It is as if the link between words and realities has been severed. The would-be communicator then possesses only the words and has lost touch (wholly or partially) the things they stand for." (S. I. Hayakawa)

The person who has "lost touch" doesn't know it. They are quite sure that they know what they're talking about. They're proud of their language and embrace the associated emotions.