In The Old Child she excels as miniaturist, examining the psychology of her blank-eyed outsider with language as sharp as a scalpel - no sentimentality here.
Swift has worked hard to effect this kind of communion -- to provide a taste of what it's like inside her life -- since the beginning, back when she was a teenage country singer writing about feeling like an outsider in language that made her listeners feel like insiders.
One idea was simply to feature a collection of words from the baffling (to outsiders) Estonian language.Ultimately simplicity won out: in a public vote in 2004, Estonians chose a geographic outline of the country, designed by artist Lembit Lõhmus, to adorn their coins.
Because large societies have frequent interaction with outsiders, their languages undergo simplification.
A typical education in the west leaves you with more insight into ancient Rome or Egypt than into our financial system – and while there are plenty of books and DVDs for lay people about, say, quantum mechanics, evolution or the human genome, before the crash there was virtually nothing to explain finance to outsiders in accessible language.
To outsiders, the switch in language from "tangible common equity" to "Tier 1 capital" signified nothing.
But it is also true that religious groups use arcane language which outsiders (including local council officers) would find baffling.
Some tribes wishing to keep their language from outsiders for cultural or religious reasons have retained researchers on the condition that their findings remain unpublished.
We spoke a language that outsiders couldn't comprehend, planned adventures in damp and foetid pubs, drove miles through the night to gain remote crags as the sun came up.
Muddying the investigators' trail, these outfits work from within tight-knit ethnic communities, rebuff outsiders and speak languages unfamiliar to Western ears, like Urdu, Arabic and Hindi.
An outsider using that same campy language is very different.
