Editing Paul Erdős (section)

=== Emotional Style and Pragmatic Language ===
Erdős referred to children as “epsilons,” to God as “the Supreme Fascist,” and to death as “leaving.” His vocabulary was '''idiosyncratically formalized and emotionally desaturated''', using '''code-like references''' for life events that others experienced with feeling.

This '''affective abstraction''' and '''linguistic literalism''' are not quirks—they are traits of autistic expression. He often failed to detect sarcasm, irony, or passive aggression, and replied to subtle conversational cues with flat literalness. When asked if he felt lonely, he replied: “I don’t know. I’m not sure what loneliness is.”
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