Marathe and Steeply: the soup (p. 421)
Steeply slowly nodded, as if to only himself. ‘There wasn’t just pure malice. There was never the sense that here were some people who had just all of a sudden let the air out of your tires for no reason.’ ‘You allege we disperse our resources deflating automobile tires?’ ‘A figure of speech. Or for example a serial killer. A sadist. Somebody who wants you down just for the deviant sake of wanting you down. A deviant.’
Context
Night on the Tucson outcropping: Marathe converts the tire idiom into a literal allegation of resource-dispersal, and Steeply has to stop and name the device outright before he can go on. Kept at texture on the plan's conditional: the rest of the Marathe–Steeply idiom comedy was rejected as communication material, but here the linguistic category itself gets named on the page — the conversation forced briefly into talking about how it's talking.