"How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicat… - Douglas Hofstadter

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent
behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But
essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:
to respond to situations very flexibly;
to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a
situation;
to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities may link them;
to synthesize new concepts by taking old them together in new ways; to come up
with ideas which are novel.