Propelled by the third wave of variationist sociolinguistics, the present work argues that pragmatic and variationist inquiry are mutually enriching and fundamentally united. Relying on both traditions, I develop a general principle of language use and interpretation – briefly: utterances are evaluated according to not only their own semiotic character but also what sets them apart from that of alternative utterances that appear to offer a favorable mix of costs and benefits in context. I demonstrate that these principles underlie a wide range of phenomena observed in third-wave and pragmatics literature, with particular focus on two cases of social meaning rooted in semantically based inferences: (i) John McCain’s reference to Barack Obama as ‘that one’ in a 2008 US presidential debate; and (ii) the tendency for phrases of the form the Xs (e.g. the Democrats) to depict the referents as a bloc separate from the speaker in a way that bare plurals (e.g Democrats) do not (Acton 2019). As I will show, the perspective developed in this work makes principled predictions and leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and within multiple dimensions of meaning.