Karly

I seem to be returning a lot to pragmatics and language lately. Probably because that’s what comes most naturally to me in the midst of a month that is difficult when you haven’t really got a lot planned. Don’t worry, content will be planned and posted, in its due time, for now, enjoy the endless linguistic rambling.

The first thing you learn in pragmatics is that meaning is slippery. It isn’t always in the words themselves. It’s in the context, the tone, the timing. It’s in what gets left unsaid. You learn about implicature, about how people say one thing and mean another, and how somehow, we still understand each other. Most of the time.

It felt academic when I first read about it. Gricean maxims, conversational flouting, politeness theory. I thought it would help me write better essays. I didn’t realise how much it would help me survive my life.

Because the truth is, I’ve spent years trying to decode people. Friends, family, women I admire, messages I’ve reread too many times. I don’t always need the words. I just need the signals. And linguistics gave me the vocabulary to name the moments that used to make me feel crazy.

When someone says “I’m just really busy right now,” I hear the flout of quantity. They’re not giving enough information. When someone says “I mean, you can do what you want,” I hear the flout of manner. Indirect, vague, slightly sharp. When someone replies “okay :)” with the full stop and no other punctuation, I don’t need a translation. I already know.

I didn’t always. I used to take people at face value. I believed what was said more than how it was said. I trusted that language was meant to be clear. But it isn’t. It’s full of performance. It’s full of shields. And once you learn to read between the lines, you start seeing all the places where people are trying not to say the thing out loud.

You start noticing the hesitations, the strategic silences, the polite lies. You hear the friend who says “I’m so happy for you” and sense the resentment beneath it. You see the text that says “Let’s definitely catch up soon” and recognise it as a gentle goodbye. You hear someone say “I didn’t mean it like that” and realise they absolutely did.

Linguistics taught me that language is never just information. It’s power. It’s negotiation. It’s damage control. It’s desire disguised as detachment. And the people who seem the calmest, the most careful, the most edited, are often saying more than they realise.

This isn’t about overthinking. It’s about noticing. It’s about attention. Studying language taught me that discomfort often lives in the gaps. In the pause before a reply. In the way someone starts a sentence and abandons it. In the emoji they used instead of saying what they really felt.

And yes, sometimes I wish I could unlearn it. I wish I could go back to reading things at surface level. I wish I didn’t know that “No worries if not” is usually said by someone who absolutely does worry. I wish I didn’t read subtext like a second language. But I do.

I do, and I’m grateful. Because reading between the lines means I hear people more clearly. It means I hear myself more clearly. It means I can hold the contradictions of what’s said and what’s meant without collapsing under the weight of it.

It means I can sit with a message that says “It’s fine” and know that it’s not. And I can decide what to do with that knowledge, instead of waiting for clarity that was never going to come.

That, to me, is fluency. Not just in English, but in people.

And if any of this made you want a beginners’ crash course in pragmatics, honestly, let me know. I could teach a whole seminar on flouting and face-threatening acts using only WhatsApp screenshots and real-life spirals. Consider this post your teaser.
Also, have you all watched Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials on Netflix? I was so proud of myself for solving it in under two episodes. Years of reading between the lines have prepared me for many things, but apparently, murder plots are now one of them, too.