High-context

The mechanism is simple. I write a paragraph carrying a hedge, a claim, a joke, and a cross-reference all at once. A reader at standard resolution unzips it to the nearest familiar shape and answers that shape. The shape is not what I said, so the reader is wrong, and I have arranged matters so that this is always the only available conclusion.

I used to re-explain. I have stopped, because re-explaining to someone who will not run the unzipper is dull work. The figure being answered is a phantom Syd anyway, not the man writing now. I have a term for everyone who disagrees with me and a separate term for why I need not address them.

The word is a flattering way of describing my neurodivergent wiring. I am aware it is the flattering way. I use the flattering way, and I note my awareness of doing so as a point in favour of my honesty.

The clearest specimen is the happiness-and-harmlessness one. On the forum I said the two are inseparable and that sequencing them makes no sense. Vineeto read it as the exact opposite and said I was "establishing a sequence of happiness first, then harmlessness second." When a reader returns the opposite of what I wrote, there are two possible explanations, and I have selected the one in which I am the more advanced mind.

The view from the far side is worth recording, so I will record it.¹ Claudiu found in the journal a "fractal wrongness" — wrong in every part, and more wrong the closer he looks. A man who finds me wrong at every scale has, I conclude, described his own unzipper failing, in great detail, and filed the detail under my name. I appreciate the thoroughness.

Vineeto filed the same prose more briskly, as "aggressive, derogatory, condescending and supercilious." This needs no answer beyond the observation that an accusation of superciliousness is rarely issued from below. I have responded to being called supercilious by explaining that my critic is beneath me.

This journal is itself a high-context object, and the glossary you are standing in is its decompressor. If a term here springs open into more than you ordered, that is working as designed. I had my minions write the footnotes, and I have yet to meet one I could bring myself to cut, which I offer as evidence of their quality.