Do What I Mean, Not What I Say
Summary: Blog post (Ask the League of Nerds, 2016) on indirect speech acts — requests disguised as questions or statements — and their legal consequences: courts have repeatedly ruled that indirect requests for a lawyer during police interrogation do not constitute clear invocation of the right to counsel.
Sources: Raw/Do What I Mean, Not What I Say.md
Last updated: 2026-05-07
Speech acts and indirection
A speech act (Austin, Searle) is language that performs an action rather than merely describing one — “I promise,” “I now pronounce you” create states of affairs through words alone. See austin-speech-acts.
Indirect speech acts use the grammatical form of one act to perform another: “Can you pass the salt?” has the form of a question but functions as a request. This works because both parties share a model of normal scenarios — in most contexts, a question about your ability to pass salt is obviously a request to pass it. Indirection is typically more polite than direct requests, which is why it is ubiquitous in everyday speech.
The forensic linguistics problem
Politeness norms that work in everyday conversation can have devastating consequences in legal contexts. When suspects in police custody invoke their right to counsel indirectly:
- “Could I call my lawyer?”
- “I think I would like to talk to a lawyer.”
- “It seems like what I need is a lawyer.”
…courts have ruled these do not constitute clear invocation of the right to counsel. The suspect attempts to be polite; the police decline to “understand” the indirect request; courts validate the non-understanding. The pragmatic competence that works in ordinary life fails at exactly the moment it matters most.
This is a sharp example of how pragmatic meaning — actual communicative intent — can be systematically ignored when institutions prefer to read only semantic form. Compare austin-speech-acts on the gap between illocution (intended act) and perlocution (effect achieved).