The Colonel Language and Communication Quotes

You can't go anywhere without the media getting in there. The influence of American television is huge. Everywhere you go, you can hear shows in the English language. Could be that this is meant to suggest North American dominance. It is a cop show, after all. Maybe this indicates the reach of messages of crime and punishment?

Is this just polite chit-chat? Who's asking? Already noted is the passive tense. The voice comes out in a disembodied way. This is a typical question for a typical tourist encounter, only this isn't a typical situation. Still, a sentence like this seems to suggest formalities have to be dispensed with, before getting to the meat of the discussion.

Tit for tat: a show in English, a commercial in Spanish. But this is a commercial, aimed at getting consumers to part with their money. Contrast that with English, which is the language of the main programming (the cop show).

Again, it's like the talk exists in a bubble, cut off from the speakers. This is just a summary of the conversation, a kind of condensed transcript. It too looks like this is just for show. Are we really supposed to feel sympathy for the difficulty of governing?

You can't blame a bird from trying. He's the only one to try to make friendly contact with the visitors, and he just gets shot down. No, not literally—at least, not yet.

That's a lot of silent saying. Notice also that the eyes—key elements in providing witness—are communicating where words cannot.

The colonel probably knows that actions may speak louder than words, and a picture may be worth a thousand words, but words have an inestimable power in print, especially with the emotion of poetry. He's mocking the speaker, maybe, but she takes him literally and gets the final word.

After all those disembodied words, now we have ears without bodies catching a scrap of voice, listening beyond the grave for the meaning of their owners' deaths.