The comedian Lewis Black has a great bit in which he describes the aneurism-inducing experience he endured after overhearing a young woman relate an utterly incomprehensible story:

“Behind me, I heard a young woman of 25 say, ‘If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,’” Black recalled. “Now, I’m gonna repeat that, because it bears repeating: ‘If it weren’t for my horse’ — as in, giddyup, giddyup, let’s go — ‘I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,’ which is a degree-granting institution.”

“Don’t think about that too long,” he closed after due consideration, “or blood will shoot out your nose!”

The joke sprang to my mind late last night after I failed to follow Black’s sage admonition upon my encounter with a similarly incoherent thought on offer not from some anonymous 20-something but a member of Congress:

I know, I know. It’s a sick burn. It totally owns congressional Republicans and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in particular. It channels the idiomatic tropes native to youthful social-media platforms such as TikTok, and oldsters like me just don’t get it, man.

But just for the sake of the exercise, let’s evaluate this sentence as though it was composed by a native English speaker and designed for the consumption of other similarly acclimated Americans. What in the world is it supposed to mean? Does it mean that males are inherently bad at math? Is it supposed to convey to the listener that “15 attempts to count votes correctly” plus “9 months” amounts to unsound arithmetic? Is the goal to suggest that McCarthy is a poor House speaker because of his innumeracy?

At the risk of answering my own question, it probably doesn’t mean anything at all. Indeed, it’s not designed to convey a comprehensible or salient point. It’s gibberish. Worse, it makes no effort to be anything other than gibberish. The point of this exercise is, rather, not to be understood by everyone. The value in this sentence is that it is vaguely recognizable as both a tribal signifier — a sign that its author’s affinities aren’t with the GOP — and a display of the jargon exclusive to a (literally) plugged-in set of youthful Americans.

You’re not supposed to understand it because it’s not supposed to be understood. It is, at most, familiar — the spectral outline of a partisan talking point. You’re just supposed to recognize it as a vague approximation of a thought that reminds you of something you’re supposed to support.

If the congresswoman were an entertainer, this sort of talk wouldn’t amount to much. Exclusivity is the coin of the realm among celebrities. And, in pulling up the linguistic drawbridge behind her, she’s burnished her personal brand. But the congresswoman is not a celebrity. She’s a congresswoman, and a prominent one at that. She appears regularly on mainstream outlets to retail her party’s agenda and popularize its governing vision. That is a station in which communications skills matter a great deal, and casting a wide net is of more value than signaling the particularness of the clan to which she belongs — a select group to which you shouldn’t even aspire to join as the barriers to entry are, apparently, utterly inscrutable.

Yes, I am admittedly indulging my grandfatherly id here. My unfashionable attachment to lucidity from our elected representatives probably comes off as curmudgeonly and old-fashioned. But there’s a lot to be said for complete sentences, punctuation, and plain language — particularly from people in the business of being understood. Maybe it marks me as outdated, but someone has to say it.