I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [94]
Exploiting the Analogies in Everyday Situations
As we’ve just seen, a remark made with the aim of talking about situation A can also implicitly apply to situation B, even if there was no intention of talking about B, and B was never mentioned at all. All it takes is that there be an easy analogy — an unforced mapping that reveals both situations to have essentially the same central structure or conceptual core — and then the extra meaning is there to be read, whether one chooses to read it or not. In short, a statement about one situation can be heard as if it were about an analogous — or, to use a slightly technical term, isomorphic — situation. An isomorphism is just a formalized and strict analogy — one in which the network of parallelisms between two situations has been spelled out explicitly and precisely — and I’ll use the term freely below.
When an analogy between situations A and B is glaringly obvious (no matter how simple it is), we sometimes will exploit it to talk “accidentally on purpose” about situation B by pretending to be talking only about situation A. “Hey there, Andy — take your muddy boots off when you come into the house!” Such a sentence, when shouted at one’s five-year-old son who is tramping in the front door with his equally mud-oozing friend Bill, is obviously addressed just as much to Bill as to Andy, via a very simple, very apparent analogy (a boy-to-boy leap, if you will, much like the earlier cookie-to-cookie leap). Hinting by analogy allows us to get our message across politely but effectively. Of course we have to be pretty sure that the person at whom we’re beaming our implicit message (Bill, here) is likely to be aware of the A/B analogy, for otherwise our clever and diplomatic ploy will all have been for naught.
Onward and upward in our chain of examples. People in romantic situations make use of such devices all the time. One evening, at a passionate moment during a tender clinch, Xerxes queries of his sweetie pie Yolanda, “Do I have bad breath?” He genuinely wants to know the answer, which is quite thoughtful of him, but at the same time his question is loaded (whether he intends it to be or not) with a second level of meaning, one not quite so thoughtful: “You have bad breath!” Yolanda answers his question but of course she also picks up on its potential alternative meaning in a flash. In fact, she suspects that Xerxes’ real intent was to tell her about her breath, not to find out about his own — he was just being diplomatic.
Now how can one statement speak on two levels at once? How can a second meaning lie lurking inside a first meaning? You know the answer as well as I do, dear reader, but let me spell it out anyway. Just as in the muddy-boots situation, there is a very simple, very loud, very salient, very obvious analogy between the two parties, and this means that any statement made about X will be (or at least can be) heard as being about Y at the same time. The X/Y mapping, the analogy, the partial isomorphism — whatever you wish to call it — carries the meaning efficiently and reliably from one framework over to the other.
Let’s look at this mode of communication in a slightly more delicate romantic situation. Audrey, who is not sure how serious Ben is about her, “innocently” turns the conversation to their mutual friends Cynthia and Dave, and “innocently” asks Ben what he thinks of Dave’s inability to commit to Cynthia. Ben, no fool, swiftly senses the danger here, and so at first he is wary about saying anything specific since he may incriminate