The Orin–Hal phone call
‘The New Haven Brown Rain thing was sort of a chortle, though, you have to admit.’ ‘Chortles are good. We like chortles. […]’
Context
Orin answers Hal's joke with the Moms's exact letter formula ("Chortling is good. We like chortling," p. 1006 — a letter possibly literally in the shoebox on Hal's lap) — the mother he claims to have erased from RAM speaking through his own idiom. Family usage as inheritance neither brother can renounce.