Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Did I really have this conversation?

Yes, I did, last week at the gas station.

“Just so you know — the card reader at the first pump isn’t working. I tried two cards.”

“How isn’t it working?”

“It doesn’t read the cards.”

[True, the machine could have eaten my card. But in that case, I would have said “The card reader ate my card.” And I wouldn’t have been able to try a second card. The technical term for this sort of stuff: conversational implicature.]

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