Intellectual activities seek understanding the way pirates capture booty. It is all about pulling up alongside, finding and holding the rhythm of the other vessel, fixing the grappling hooks in order to board and to appropriate. This is not the way understanding is usually depicted, even if appropriation is its intended aim. Philisophers in particular characterise understanding more gently, as a kind of welcoming of distant truth, held out to the foreign past. However, gentleness is an illusion in hermeneutic thought, philosophical or ethnological, as I wish to show in reflection on \'dialogue\' and \'story\' as two major intellectial grappling hooks.