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The telling of beautiful untrue things is an art

There is so much more to learn about language, about conversations: they are more than mere words and their orders or meanings in a sentence. Implicature for example; it’s a word I haven’t heard for years. The etymology seems obvious; as the spelling suggests, it means something which is implied -ie, something more, or at least different, than actually stated. The term implicature was apparently coined first by the philosopher Paul Grice sometime in the 1960ies.

There is a  really interesting etymology of its cognate verb imply, though: it is derived from the Latin plicare, meaning to fold, entangle, or entwine. This is what we can use in a conversation when we don’t want to do something for example, but are perhaps too embarrassed to say so -too embarrassed to disappoint, too afraid of the consequences of disagreement: the ‘white lie’ you invented to use on your mother when she demanded to know why you were getting home so late…

Although the word implicature may be new, the history of the concept is not, however. Perhaps an early example is the use of ‘but’ to suggest a contrast to something already stated. Or another is to reply by avoiding the question posed, or to equivocate to avoid committing oneself. I suppose we all learn to use avoidance language from an early age; I think I used it on my first date at university.

I was always a shy person in high school; in my early grades, I never had the courage to cross the gym floor to where the girls were congregated at the now old-fashioned ‘sock-hop’ school dances. In fact, I almost never went to any school dances because of the very real fear of rejection if I ever dared to brave the dimmed ceiling lights and cross the floor… I mean, then what?  

I didn’t drink, or swear, or possess any of the braggadocio my friends implored me to use. And anyway, most of the girls knew who I was: the short, curly-headed, bespectacled kid who always said embarrassing cryptic things to them. The most impressive words I had in my vocabulary were Shakespearean boasts, most of them harvested from Falstaff or Hotspur in Henry IV.  Very few of the massed huddles of girls on the other wall had read Shakespeare however; he seemed wasted on them…

No, university would be different. The women would all have read Shakespeare, or Donne, and would have been conversant in Milton, or at the very least, some of the other authors occasionally mentioned in the Reader’s Digests that populated our bathroom at home. I felt sure I could throw out a few names like confetti at a wedding and pave my way into their hearts.

Judy, though, was different; although understated and, like me, definitely unaware of haute couturage, she impressed with her mind, and not her beauty. I met her at (blush) the university Chess Club where neither of us had succeeded in winning even a single game with any of its overly ruminative members. Neither of us were taken seriously after a few quick losses, and when we found ourselves sitting on the same couch watching the pretension dripping like sweat from its regular members, we decided to go to the campus coffee shop to lick our wounds.

Throughout high school I had never met anybody with a serious interest in obscure things like me. Take classical music, for example; nobody seemed to know -or care- whether Liszt had ever written more than 2 piano concertos. Judy did, though.

“He never finished his third concerto, although he was apparently working on one, I think,” she said one day after finishing a third doughnut which, she proudly maintained, even Liszt would probably not have been able to do. Hilarious! But her mind was like that, and bounced from one dessert to another whenever we dated. Did I mention she was a large woman?

It seemed fated that we would begin to enjoy each other’s company -something that, except with my dog, I had never been able to do with anybody until University.

But one thing did bother me even though we seemed to have so much in common. Judy had some sort of issue with her weight and despite her obvious intellect, seemed convinced that people were talking about it behind her back. Me? I thought they were just jealous of her bubbly personality and impressive far-reaching knowledge base. People express their envy in different ways in university -or maybe it’s a woman thing; I have no way of knowing: females hardly ever bothered to talk to me even there…

Anyway, after several weeks, she finally confessed her concerns to me over a deluxe pizza and Pepsi in our favourite campus restaurant.

“Do you think I’m too…” -she hesitated while she searched for the best word- “…too heavy, G?”

The way her face suddenly contracted, and her forehead wrinkled, told me to be careful. Very careful. I had only thought of her as Judy, so I also had to riffle through my inner words to find one that didn’t sound false, and yet let her know that I was fond of her the way she was of me; I needed to find a suitable equivocation… “I… I like you just the way you are J.” (I hadn’t had the courage to use the ‘love’ word on her yet so I felt a little handicapped.)

But I underestimated her. “Are you using an implicature, G?”

I had to think quickly; I hadn’t heard the term before, and didn’t really want to admit it. “You mean am I white-lying to you?” I was satisfied with that clever interpretation until her eyes hardened.

“How about out-and-out black-lying, eh?” She seemed suddenly mad at me. “You, who pretend you’ve read so much Shakespeare that you can pull phrases out of the air knowing that nobody can contest them.”

My Shakespearean vocabularic excesses were a high school habit that I had trouble gainsaying I’m afraid. “Come on, J, you could at least riposte in kind, eh!?”

Her expression suddenly changed; suddenly turned on itself and for a moment, and she seemed confused. “Uhmm… was your initial implicature, a reverse implicature that basically refuted itself…?  Sort of like the Cretan Paradox of Epimenides?

She had me on that one, and I could see it by the sly grin on her face. “We’re made for each other, don’t you think?” I said, much relieved.

“Of course we are, G… Why do you think I’ve stuck with you for so long…?”

Was that an even more clever and disguised implicature? I still wonder about it…

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