Locker room, Big Buddies and fatigue — "Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice…"
Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. ‘Hyperbolicker?’ ‘My daddy as a boy, he’d have said “tuckered out” ’ll do just fine.’ ‘Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.’ ‘Phrases and clauses and models and structures,’ Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. ‘We need an inflation-generative grammar.’ Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: ‘Generate this.’ ‘Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,’ Struck says. ‘E.T.A.’s best minds on the problem. Whole thesauruses digested, analyzed.’
Context
The fatigue-lexicon riff at its peak (the setup is in the supporting cast): Troeltsch calls for an "inflation-generative grammar" — Chomsky by way of grade-inflation — Struck demands "a whole new syntax for fatigue," and Freer supplies the locker-room rejoinder to generative theory. Hal's raised eyebrow at "hyperbolicker" is the one prescriptive flicker in the room — the prodigy amused, not correcting. The kids have so internalized the grammar curriculum that they parody it to describe what it can't name.