'Everybody's a critic': the double-edge dial
‘Everybody’s a critic,’ which Jim had liked to repeat with all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge
Context
The 150 dial ("ironically about half the time") rendered as a marital tic. JOI could inflect a single dead cliché — "Everybody's a critic" — through "all different shades and pitches of ironic double-edge," an entire relationship's worth of argument compressed into the tones of one phrase. It's the same tonal undecidability that made him unreadable even to those closest (178): a man who could mean a cliché a dozen ironic ways at once. (Thin, but in-theme; the "best arguments" marital substance is family-hamlet's.)