In this sense thinking is not an individual activity so much as a collective one. Thinking, as Garfinkel suggests, takes place in the world. Each syntagma bears an assigned portion of the ideal projection with nothing positive residing within any of them. A common model of linguistic communication speaks of meanings being encoded in words by speakers, which are then decoded by listeners. That is to say, meaning is a collaboration, and the ethnomethodology of this collaborative activity must become a central part of linguistic investigation.
Words collect their meanings according to their collaborated usages.
What an expression has come to mean, at a given local time and place, informs the speaker about what expressive possibilities are available - and just those possibilities, in just the way the listeners and speakers provide for them, and no more. Or if there is 'more', then there has to be the local work of the listeners and speakers providing for that, too. There is not a private language, or even a collision of private languages, but the local establishment of the conventions of a language game whose rules never quite get fully written. As the components of an emerging system are displayed, and these usages are ratified, a competent system of linguistic communication becomes ready at hand for the participants. The system bears the communicative possibilities that are present.