Doug Jones: language Evolution: "People don’t just communicate by encoding and decoding literal meanings, but by inferring one another’s communicative intentions, always thinking 'I wonder what he meant by that'. There’s a whole branch of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, that studies how this works. And pragmatic inference in language is just one instance of a special, powerful human aptitude for creating shared intentions. This aptitude means that there are always ways to subvert official speech, in any language, even Ascian or Newspeak. Or Korean: the news several years ago was that North Korea had banned sarcasm:׳Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as “This is all America’s fault” would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime׳...
#noted
