"Just an unnecessary name of something! What does a comma do?"

And ol’ Steiny rolls in her grave.

So Gertrude has gone off the old hook on this one. Punctuation, adjectives and the all encompassing noun, she’s not letting one get away before she can rub its figurative face in the dirt. Nouns are “just an unnecessary name of something” in her terms. THINGS ARE, without having a name associated with them. Punctuation is understood autonomous to their textual symbols; there is no need to write a question mark. And adjectives are simply the common hors d’oeuvres to an unsatisfying meal called noun.
I enjoyed what she had to say about slang, being the progressive state of nouns and by people creating slang they keep language alive. Nas la mean?
Her ideas related to nouns reminded me of this book I started reading last year called “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” by Charles Seife, about the history and danger of zero. Mesopotamians were the first to have used the concept of zero. Before then it had never really came into the frame of mathematics, due to the fact that zero has little to do with everyday life. When I leave the room we say to ourselves “Christian isn’t here” not “There is zero Christian here.” Without its mathematical relevance zero is useless. But zero does exist, dangerously lurking in the void God talks about in the first couple lines of Genesis. Stein somehow is saying the same thing related to the nouns. Whether we are going to recognize the names of things relevant to our concepts of reality, or not, names of things can be obsolete. Or "uninteresting" in her termage. But I found myself only agreeing with this until I came to the end of the essay.
The best example she shared was the impression Shakespeare had on her after describing the forest without mentioning anything having to do with a forest. That’s it. Describe something without describing it. That’s why Homer was the dopest poet ever. Blind! Booyah. Another nugget of gold was “…yet poetry being poetry nouns are nouns.” All that effort to denounce nouns and now there’s no way of getting around them. So what is it? Stein acknowledges naming elements of our reality -vibrating sounds out our throats>categorization>language>understanding- but then relates it back to the poetic reference. “…the noun must be replaced not by inner balance but by the thing itself and that will eventually lead to everything,” meaning poem comes close, but doesn’t touch the thing. It took me a while after cutting through her molasses thick vernacular.