Does that sometimes mean ratting out fellow inmates


Senior Member
In the movie ''The Lincoln Lawyer'' the lawyer is asking questions a jailhouse snitch on the stand who's been arrested several times and says: so you know how the system works, yeah?
Snitch: I try to survive.
Lawyer: Does that sometimes mean ratting out fellow inmates?
Why does the lawyer add ''sometime'' here? What if he leaves that off?
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  • perpend

    American English
    "snitch" can be relative.

    A "snitch" can just lie to try to improve his/her fate.
    A "snitch" can rat others out to improve his/her fate.


    Senior Member
    India - Hindi
    The snitch does a lot of thing to survive and ratting out on fellow inmates is one of those thing.


    Senior Member
    German/English bilingual
    The snitch doesn't always rat out fellow inmates, but only sometimes, such as when there is no other way to achieve his objectives.

    It would have made a bit more sense if the lawyer had said "involve" instead of "mean", or if the word order had been changed to "Does that mean sometimes ratting...", the point being that "sometimes" indicates that something happens occasionally rather than frequently. Here it isn't the "meaning" that's occasional, but the "ratting out".
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