Linguistically Speaking

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.


From: Carol Ann Duffy, Mean Time (1993)

Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.

7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him -
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

From: Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife (1999)

Heute zum Beispiel:







sprachtaten.phbern.ch

Kulick argues that in sexual contexts, 'no' produces a feminine or subordinate subject position for the person who utters it. That is why 'no' may be construed (in the case of sadomasochism, must be) as submission rather than refusal; it is also why men who claim 'homosexual panic' are not necessarily asked whether, instead of physically attacking the man who approached them, they could not simply have said no. [...] [Thus], the utterance or non-utterance of 'no' in response to another's desire is performative of gender.

Cameron, Deborah and Don Kulick. 2003. "Introduction: Language and Desire in Theory and Practice." In: Language & Communication 23, 93-105.

Say what the original sentence could have been, and explain the circumstances of the situation:
a) They said that they love each other.

Answer:

They said: "We love each other."
Some time ago they told me that they love each other.
I believe it.
And they are still doing it.

(good on them, I say)