Hinting

A high school girl posting on a web forum hinting at underaged prostitution has been arrested.

What are you hinting at?

Do you get what I'm hinting at?

He's still hinting that he likes her.

At the end of last month, May of 2014, Bratislav, of Croatian descent, had left the Lulu Island neighbourhood, he having bought a new house and abandoning his slender townhouse. One of our last meetings in the neighbourhood was at the Rideau School field. We discussed plenty. Russia and China had been "State Capitalist" regimes and not "Communist" as they claimed to be. There was an alien "spacecraft" hovering invisibly above the grassy field; oh no, it was some kind of "portal"; oh no, it was an "incorporeal being." Many East Asian logograms, or "Sinograms," had a categorizing radical along with a hinting phonetic radical; they were not all pictographic. Daoists, I said, liked to be like a simple driftwood. There were aliens aplenty, Bratislav repeated. That day on the field last month, the thousands of dandelions were abundant with cloudy tufts of their soon-to-fly seeds.

As a writing system, English is neither phonemic like Spanish nor logographic like Chinese. Japanese has both phonemic and logographic in tandem. Other phonemic writings include Esperanto, Interlingua, Tagalog, Italian, Hawaiian, etc. Spanish writing with its accents is like musical notation, based on sounds. English writing is not this way, just hinting at the sound. I have not encountered a linguistics term that applies to the English way.

That's what I'm hinting at.

The professor is always hinting at a disturbing future.

Risa herself was questioned, as she expected, but the ladies took their cue from Marie and appeared content with her somewhat short answers, even when she only turned her gaze downward and blushed at the hintings at her betrothal.