Interlocutor: "How long have you lived in Portland?" Drone: "Lived?" Interlocutor: "Is there a notary public in this neighborhood?" Drone: "Is there?" Drone ultimately approaches all conversation as a series of concurrent monologues, his own focussing, strangely, on whether the grooming product "beard oil" is meant to reduce facial squeaking.
Yet, among my Chinese interlocutors, I find a growing feeling that what's worked for China for the past 30 years — a huge Communist Party-led mobilization of cheap labor, capital and resources — will not work much longer.
In the ensuing Twitter back-and-forth with multiple outraged interlocutors, I focused on defending the rational integrity of my case – without pausing to consider that it was badly marred by its lack of rhetorical integrity.
That's not because I've cultivated a winsome, bulletproof persona to intimidate would-be interlocutors – I'm as vulnerable-seeming a comedian as you could ever hope not to encounter.
On his show the next day, a caller asked how the interview had gone, and Savage described his interlocutor: "If I told you he looked like Obama, I wouldn't be far from the truth".
I was with someone from the American Association of Publishers, my interlocutor and I were talking about how much we loved his work.
He described them as "a confederacy of fools," and asked his interlocutor, "Am I dealing with a complete retard?" In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts.
He was told by his Burmese interlocutor – with, I understand, a straight face – that Burma had extensive experience of running elections and no need of anyone to offer advice on or check out the process.
This worry would be even more pronounced when we try to move from communication to disagreement, where, by hypothesis, there is a sentence involving the words in question that my interlocutor and I don't both accept.
