Much of what you mean, you never say.

Ask “Coffee?” across an office and nobody hears just a drink. It might be an offer, a request, an invitation, or a hint that everyone needs a break. One word carries all of it, and everyone in the room reads it without a thought.

In lectures at Harvard in 1967, the philosopher Paul Grice set what a sentence says apart from what a speaker means by saying it. In the paper that came from them, he called the extra meaning an implicature. Ask a friend to the cinema and hear “I’m on an early shift”, and nothing has been said about films, yet you have plainly been told no.

Every look handed back to our index carries both: three things stated and three things meant. What a mind says it found and what it meant by it travel together, side by side, so the meaning is kept along with the words.

Much of what you mean, you never say. A record of the words alone would miss it. Our index keeps a place for it in every look.