The White Flag AA meeting (pp. 363–364)
‘What I think I like is how “It was good to hear you” ends up, like, saying two separate things together.’ […] ‘When they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped them out somehow,’ he says, ‘but plus now also I like saying it myself because if you think about it it also means it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear.’
Context
Gately doing semantics. The self-described non-lexical Staffer unpacks the AA formula "Good to hear you" and finds it genuinely ambiguous — two readings, both operative — which is exactly the kind of close reading Joelle is about to perform destructively on "But For the Grace of God." The counterpoint is the scene's engine: Gately's amateur parse finds surplus meaning in the dialect; Joelle's trained parse, minutes later, finds none at all.