This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big bal

This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...