I wish I had wise or at least witty words about it all, but it's such a BIG topic! I'll just dive in and see if I touch on anything you'd like to go on with.

Before my graduate studies in education, my bachelor's was in a top-ranking college of journalism and COMMUNICATION. What you say about actual words carrying only a fraction of the whole meaning is quite true, and even the words (as we see so dramatically here!) can be subject to various communication problems,

Which brings me to the language and forms of
so-called learning disabilities -- not my area of education policy expertise, although in the 80s I did serve as interim principal of a large elementary school designated as the tri-county magnet for kids with physical disabilities (which are so often intertwined with emotional, and sometimes mental, challenges.) Then when I was a large state's director of instruction, I had the three instruction and curriculum "bureaus" under me on the organizational chart for a year or two, including all the ESE (exceptional student education) services, Head Start and Title I, etc. But even the "regular" programs has to deal with all sorts of similar issues, accommodating differences with differentiated instruction, remediation of subject area and skills deficiencies, language problems among non-English speakears, etc. And then perfectly "normal" kids would have a crisis like losing a parent or losing a limb and suddenly they would have a learning problem too, which brings me to the thought that --

I do consider myself a disciple of Gardner's, not just his famous multiple intelligences but his later cognitive, education theory and leadership studies. So I should say that I believe both that there are research findings to inform our efforts to think, teach, learn and persuade each other, *AND* that despite the reality of those findings and their often-useful application in classrooms, in the aggregate, that every mind (teacher, parent, or student) is unique and laughably too complicated for any of us to to treat education as behavioral conditioning, the way a Skinnerian would.

Gosh, just getting started and it's time to run -- taking a breath, and a break for chauffeuring, shall we go on later?