Word: hearers
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Taken literally, these sentences are inane. The second is an overstatement, and the answer to the first is obvious. Fortunately, the hearer assumes that the speaker is rational and listens between the lines. Yes, your point is to request the salt, but you're doing it in such a way that first takes care to establish what linguists call "felicity conditions," or the prerequisites to making a sensible request. The underlying rationale is that the hearer not be given a command but simply be asked or advised about one of the necessary conditions for passing the salt. Your goal...
...that caffeine keeps him up at night. Later he slaps his forehead: "'Coffee' doesn't mean coffee! 'Coffee' means sex!" The moment is funny, but it's also a reminder of just how carefully romantic partners must always tread. Make too blatant a request, as in Tootsie, and the hearer is offended; too subtle, as in Seinfeld, and it can go over the hearer's head...
...Role of Humor in Action Movies. The progression is easy: take your run-of-the-mill put-down, one-liner or joke--preferably old enough to seem fresh now--and slap it into a situation where the only other people in the room are the joke-hearer and someone with acid for blood and a bad case of extraterrestrial colic. Rewording may be necessary. Example: "Who do I have to fuck around here to get off this ship?" or the old-school misogynistic refrain recontextualized "Must be a chick thing." File under sub-heading The Role of the Quotidian, such...
...merely the oppositional juxtaposition of elemental thingnesslessness in the compass of universal nessness. Then, I thought of beating around the burning angst-bush that served as the canine existential dogma that blocked my odyssey. I caught on fire, burning, screaming no one heard me, I thought, except the Hearer, who was asleep for a few hours. I was in pain, but thankfully was saved by a Jorge-Luis Borges short story...
...unspoken questionings of the People; America Was Promises urged the same People to demand their rights ("Listen! Brothers! . . ./ Companions of leaves: of the sun"). These symphonic musings inspired Edmund Wilson to malicious parody: "And the questions and/ Questions/ questioning What am I? O/ What shall I/ remember? . . ./ Till the hearer cried:/ 'If only MacLeish could remember if only could...