It is argued that a variety of indirect meanings and speech acts can be explained by a 'meaning detachment rule', according to which saying X, and saying that X means that Q, can amount to saying that Q. This rule sheds light on the arbitrariness of signs, on Grice's entailment of 'mean', on the non-performative character of such. speech-act verbs as 'insult', 'threaten', 'blackmail' etc. A wide variety of so-called explicit performatives and related utterances are linguistically studied in the light of the logic of self-referring interpretations. Linguistic arguments are provided to the effect that these utterances are primarily assertions.