For a native speaker, meaning rarely comes before articulation. We think and speak simultaneously. But for a foreigner to a tongue, meaning came first and is then translated into spoken language. This process of translation performed before an audience generates a tension that holds the audience so riveted that they feel a tangible sense of exhaustion. A process ordinarily transparent begins to reveal its material transactions. Language stutters.
Like the newspaper, shredded and interleaved, one encounters the surface of a language - observing it, reacting to it and interpreting it. Encountering a surface once familiar, now dislocated and somewhat alien, yet recognizable and tangible.