ABSTRACT
This paper is concerned with interactional systemics and language in personal usage, also with the extent to which indirection – understood as intentional and unintentional miscommunication – serves as a root metaphor for social interaction per se. In elaborating how it is possible for two individuals, Doris and Sid, regularly and habitually to talk past each other in the English village of Wanet, this chapter enters into a discussion on interiority, and the indirection which inevitably occurs when language is ‘refracted’ by the boundary of the body: when the privacy of an individual’s internal conversation meets the publicity of external exchange. A view of society is posited as an indirect coming-together (unintentional and intentional) of a diversity of individual worlds of meaning.
