Say what you mean; mean what you say.

So when a character walks up to a lady friend and he calls her a tramp, she slaps him, real hard, which is exactly to the point.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the guy is gangsta and the lady is a moll.   He meant what he said, and she believed him.  Clarity but no drama.  Sometimes we just needs a little context for us to get it right.  The rest of the story is the guy has learned prior to this slap that she is not a tramp, but a real lady and not one he wants to be in a relationship with, not just yet.  He needs to finish a few scores before he goes legit!


First, don’t mince words, be concise. Use as few words as possible to say exactly what you mean, just as Professor Strunk advises every would be stylist. Second, mean what you say. Now, we have to entertain the problematical ambiguity of these words.

I believe it is for the reader/listener to determine if the speaker is actually credible, means what he says. For example, I tell my sweetheart that “I love her.” She of course can say, “Do you mean that?” Or she could say, “What do you mean by love?” The one thing she is not going to say is, “I love you, too,” unless of course she means it, or maybe she was just trying to get past an embarrassing moment, in which case she didn’t mean it. Now if I really want to be heard, well then I have to ante up. “Will you marry me?” Now she can play dumb and ask if I think she is some kinda fortune teller, or she will answer the direct question. Either way, I am way ahead of telling her that I love her.  Or am I?

One is reminded of the Mad Hatter and Alice and the riddle of the raven and the writing desk, “Why is the raven like a writing-desk?” Lewis Carroll said he never had an answer in mind for the riddle when he wrote his fantasy.  Pundits eventually came up with the answer.   "Edgar Allan Poe, because he  his poem 'The Raven' was his favorite poem and one which he had written on his favorite writing-desk." 

Now, back to the Mad Hatter.  For purposes of a criticism of Alice, the Hatter pursues her glee at having a riddle to solve.  For when Alice said she’d "guess," he said, "Do you mean “answer” the riddle?" She says yes. He would have everyone say what they mean then (in this case answer the riddle, not guess at the riddle). Alice retorts that she believes she means what she said.  I for one see splitting hairs, but let’s digress.

I think a writer says what the writer means to say and not something else unless she is putting words into the mouth of a narrator or a character, which invites a second level of assessment by reader/audience: do we or should we believe the words of the narrator/character.  The relationship between the writer and the audience is essentially in play and verbal irony is introduced into the situational irony that provides us with entertainment.  By the way, if in your relationship one or more of the the ladies, and you like verbal irony, you are not necessarily going to be spared, ya smart alek.

Richard J. Hilber. Saturday, March 17, 2012.

An excerpt from Chapter VII. A Mad Tea Party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is available online.  See Millennium Fulcrum Edition 2.7a. © 1991 Duncan Research with this link  https://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch1.html.