The professional conversationalist (pp. 31–32)
I can’t just sit here watching you think I’m mute while your fake nose points at the floor. And are you hearing me talking, Dad? It speaks. It accepts soda and defines implore and converses with you.’
Context
The scene's cruelest grammar: pleading to be heard, Hal shifts to third person and calls himself It — a thing that "defines implore" being the best evidence of personhood he can produce. Defining words is what he has instead of a way through to his father; two lines later his replies become the typographic silence ('…') JOI hallucinated all along.