Talking in walls

“The walls we have to erect about ourselves are immaterial walls, the walls of an idiolect whose terms and turns of phrase are not in the dictionary and the manuals of rhetoric.  Not only the talk of lovers, but every conversation that is resumed again and again becomes, over time, incomprehensible to outsiders.  There is secrecy in every conversation.  In the measure that this wall of secrecy gets thinner, we more and more utter but current opinions, conventional formulas, and inconsequential judgements”

-Alphonso Lingis, 1994 (The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg. 77)