Green ESL

I want to speak AAVE!  It's efficient

In defense of rap lyrics (locutionary/illocutionary)

Sorry, I'm afraid I can't excuse you.

What if, every time you said "Excuse me," you expected a response like, "OK, let me think of an excuse for you.  For now, I can't seem to think of one, so I can't excuse you, but when I think of an excuse I'll let you know.  Do you mind sticking around until then?"  This response would of course be ridiculous, and you might slowly back away in shock before the person had a chance to finish her words.  The truth is, when we say "excuse me," we don't mean it literally.  Everyone knows this, as we can all agree that taking the words literally and giving a response like the above would either constitute sarcasm or prove that someone is a robot with an inadequate parsing system.

Here's another, more realistic example:  I was in a coffee shop once waiting for a student to show up whom I was tutoring.  The coffee shop had large tables arranged such that many strangers could sit at the same table.  This was a good arrangement for meeting students, since we could sit side-by-side and look at the same lesson material more easily.  While I was sitting at one of these tables, I realized I didn't have a chair for my student when he came.  The cafe was getting crowded, so I thought I had better grab a chair from somewhere else.  As I was lifting a chair from another table to bring it over, an older gentleman from that table suddenly asked me, "Been hittin' the gym?"  At first I had no idea what this man was talking about.  Why would he ask about my exercise routine?  I often have the problem of taking things literally, so I did a quite mental scan to determine the last time I went to a gym.  It had been a long time, but fortunately I lifted some weights that very morning!  So I replied, "Ah, no...but actually I lifted weights this morning!"  This may have been a mistake, because I don't think it was what the man wanted to hear, based on his lackluster facial expression after my response.  He was, of course, making sarcastic small-talk in reference to my lifting the chair.  The chair wasn't particularly heavy, but this man saw it as an opportunity to make a simple joke and start small talk.  He was probably retired, and simply wanted to have a light exchange of humor with a stranger.  Being the serious, solemn, non-sarcastic person I was, I failed to see this until it was too late.

The point is one that most people already know implicitly: that we often don't mean exactly what we say.  You don't really expect someone to provide an excuse for you when you say "excuse me," just as that man didn't really care whether or not I had been to a health club recently.  In linguistics, there are two fancy terms for these phenomena: locutionary force and illocutionary force.