Those are good points, thanks for all the advice.

With the gate, I was trying to provide a sort of 'hook' and nudge readers towards thoughts about multiple words; I wondered if it was too clumsy, but you pointed to it and so I guess so. I'll remove that. Also tone down the exclamation marks. I think the dinner joke makes sense in context, though: every conversation is a tug of war, and the reaction to abstraction is concreteness and vice versa... hm, actually what would make more sense is pointing out 'how does he get back'.

(I don't know how good the revised version is; the story's pretty personal, and I doubt anyone but me appreciates the three levels of interpretation, but then, I didn't write it for anyone but me.)