How to Stick to Your Topic and Save Your Neck

John DeLorean with namesake (Photo by Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Conversations are often like football games in which each speaker tries to score a touchdown. We all find ourselves in conversations in which we try to get our topic discussed while other participants try to block us and introduce their own topics. When this happens to us, one defense is to keep recycling our topic until eventually we get our listeners to hear us out. The way we maintain our topics is an important but often unrecognized part of the discourse.

One of the jobs of discourse analysts is to take note of the topics that participants bring up and recycle during their conversations. These provide useful evidence of speakers’ agendas. Usually after someone brings up a topic, listeners respond by adding something, ignoring it, or changing it to what they’d rather talk about. That’s the natural ebb and flow of conversations — and we usually don’t stop to think much about it.

In the legal context, however, the topics introduced and recycled are especially important for understanding the recorded evidence of police interviews, courtroom questioning, and undercover investigations. In tape-recorded covert operations, linguists find that it’s critically important to observe what topic maintenance can tell us. Here’s an example from a famous case that you may remember.

In 1982, the government indicted a respected car manufacturer, John DeLorean, for his alleged agreement to purchase illegal drugs and have them resold on the street, a scheme that would net him enough money to save his financially troubled company from bankruptcy. If you’re too young to recall the DeLorean case, you might remember the movie, Back From the Future, in which the vehicle that transported the hero through time was one of the very few sleek, wing-door, DeLorean cars that managed to come off of his assembly line, in Ireland, before the company folded after DeLorean was unable to secure interim loans or new investors.

It was never clear why the government selected DeLorean as its target, but for about six months an FBI agent posing as a banker tried hard to implicate him, with no success, while purportedly trying to help him get his loan or interim financing. The agent’s 63 taped conversations failed to yield anything that even suggested illegal intentions by DeLorean. Perhaps in desperation, the agent then enlisted the help of a drug dealer named James Hoffman, who had recently been arrested while flying illegal drugs into the country. If Hoffman could persuade DeLorean to invest in his phony drug operation, he would receive certain considerations that could be useful to him in his forthcoming sentencing hearing. (Warning: the Wikipedia account of the DeLorean case is inaccurate in many ways.)

The FBI secretly videotaped the 64th meeting, at which Hoffman met with DeLorean at L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, in Washington. Even though Hoffman described his drug-investment plans, DeLorean indicated his unwillingness to be involved in this scheme by telling Hoffman a blatant untruth — that he was getting the money he needed from another source, hinting that it was the Irish Republican Army, in order to scare Hoffman off. Undaunted, Hoffman then introduced the topic of  “interim financing,” muddily suggesting that DeLorean could invest in the (phony) drug scheme with the small amount of money his company had left. Hoffman would then have the drugs sold on the street, and DeLorean could reinvest the returns in more drugs and repeat this process until he had enough money to stave off the bankruptcy court. When Hoffman uttered the expression “interim financing,” DeLorean’s ears pricked up immediately, and he interrupted Hoffman saying, “Yeah, that’s the better way to go,” associating it with the phony banker’s promise that Hoffman could help him find people who would provide interim financing. But he ignored Hoffman’s description about the way sales from the drugs could be invested in the drug scheme.

In spite of wrenching DeLorean’s “better way to go” from context, Hoffman’s meaning of “interim financing” formed the basis of the government’s prosecution. That is, the prosecutor incorrectly inferred that DeLorean’s “that’s the better way to go” signaled his agreement to participate in the drug scheme, even though DeLorean could reasonably understand that he was saying that legally obtained interim financing was what he wanted.

So where does topic maintenance play a role in this? I searched for the context of “interim financing” and “investment.” During the preceding 63 recorded conversations that DeLorean had with the FBI agent posing as a banker, the two expressions were used many dozens of times. But never once did they relate to anything but legally obtaining interim financing and investments. Now, although this expression had clearly been legally benign throughout their 63 conversations, the government claimed that they suddenly referred to something illegal. But DeLorean had maintained his topic throughout, even during this alleged “smoking gun” part of the conversation. This was made clear at trial, and DeLorean was acquitted.

The moral of this story is that speakers should stick with their own topic even when others try to manipulate it into something different. Like DeLorean, it could save your neck. But there’s also another, perhaps less obvious, moral here. We writers don’t suffer from calculating undercover agents like Hoffman who try to convert our topics into something very different, but we do have inner voices that sometimes let us wander away from our main topic when seemingly important new, but less relevant, ideas come to us. DeLorean can be a model for us. Sticking with our main idea can save our necks from messing up an otherwise coherent and well-organized essay.

Roger Shuy is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University, where he created and led its doctoral program in sociolinguistics.