 Knowledge of sentence implicatures is a crucial component of linguistic  competence.[76]  Speakers unaware of them are likely to mislead their audience. Imagine the possibilities if an oblivious speaker said Your husband saw a woman to the subject’s wife. Hearers without such knowledge are likely to either misinterpret or fail to fully understand the speaker. Sentence implicatures, both semantic and conversational, resemble idioms and figures of speech in being picked up by native speakers from other speakers in the course of learning the language. Sentence implicatures thus perpetuate themselves from one generation to the next as sentence meanings do. Recent metaphors are special in being picked up by adults, and are liable to become idioms if they pass on to new generations.