Incoherence, illogicality, confusion, and vagueness--with or without broken sentences and grammatical shifts--constantly mark the conversation of many Dickens characters, such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Toots, and Plornish. Needing a term to include them all, I want to appropriate "muddle," because it suggests a mixture which resists processing into a compound and it yields useful derivatives. Dickens himself uses the term for physical, mental, and institutional disorder. In Hard Times Stephen Blackpool speaks of it several times, although he is no muddler in his speech. Talking about muddle is risky. Coleridge once undertook the task, but rambled so much that Charles Lamb remarked, "He promised a lecture on the Nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet,' and in its place he has given us one in the manner of the Nurse" (Robinson, 182). One modern study of conversational incoherence finds it inevitable (Farrell 265), but another finds it impossible (Linell and Korolija 199), partly because the first takes the viewpoint of speakers using an imperfect medium and the second that of hearers cooperating to maximize meaning. Incoherence and other forms of muddle might better be seen as a matter of degree, as Sperber and Wilson see relevance: "a phenomenon is relevant to an individual to the extent that the effort required to process it optimally is small" (153).
