Christy in Norfolk, Virginia, shares a funny story about how she and a friend failed to communicate about an invitation. The friend often mentioned that she and some pals were going to a club, assuming that Christy would understand that she was also invited. Christy assumed she wasn’t invited just because she was hearing about the plans. In other words, she missed what linguists call the implicature of her friend’s statement, failing to understand that an invitation was implied. So much of conversational pragmatics involves renegotiation, restatement, and clarification, but that didn’t happen in this case. When it finally did, Christy went along to the club — and ended up meeting her future husband! This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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