Mm - hmm.
So " in France , uh , Watergate wouldn't have hurt Nixon " or something like that. Um , well , you say , " alright , I 'm supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past France universe " or something like that. The information in the sentence tells you that much but it doesn't tell you like exactly what it  what the point of doing so is. So for example , depending on the linguistic con uh , context it could be  like the question is for example , what does " Watergate " refer to there ? Does it , you know  does it refer to , um  if you just hear that sentence cold , the assumption is that when you say " Watergate " you 're referring to " a Watergate - like scandal as we might imagine it happening in France ". But in a different context , " oh , you know , if Nixon had apologized right away it wouldn't  you know , Watergate wouldn't have hurt him so badly in the US and in France it wouldn't have hurt him at all ". Now we 're s now that " Watergate "  we 're now talking about the real one ,
They 're real , right.
and the " would " sort of  it 's a sort of different dimension of hypothe - theticality , right ? We 're not saying  What 's hypothetical about this world.