I like puns and other plays on words. This is why I like doing cryptic crosswords, which depend more upon linguistic puzzles than the recall of facts, far more that the standard type. For that reason, they are harder to construct. Cryptic ones are more popular in the UK and other non-US English speaking countries, where newspapers often offer them on a daily basis. In the US The New Yorker magazine at one point offered a good cryptic crossword puzzle every Sunday but stopped doing so a few months ago, I presume because not enough people were doing it.
Because of my liking for word play, I often find humor in interpreting things differently from what the writer or speaker intended. And for someone like me, English idioms can be endlessly fascinating.
For example, I saw a heading in a newspaper on a story about the recent jewelry robbery at the Louvre that said “Prosecutor has ‘small hope’ of recovering Louvre jewels”.
I wondered what the writer intended to convey by saying ‘small hope’. If the article had said ‘little hope’, the common usage of that phrase would suggest that they have almost given up hope. But although ‘small’ and ‘little’ are pretty much synonymous, the use of ‘small hope’ conveys the sense that they do have some hope of recovery, quite different from ‘little hope’. In the body of the article, the article said ‘a small hope’ and that implies the same thing as ‘a little hope’, showing that the mere insertion of ‘a’ removes any ambiguity.
Newspaper headers are often the source of many ambiguities, sometimes quite humorous. Because they are tightly constrained for space, the headline writers omit punctuation and articles like ‘a’ and ‘the’ and this is can lead to ambiguity and amusement.
I come across such items all the time but was saved from making my own compilation because someone else has taken the trouble to do so, with gems such as “Teacher Strikes Idle Kids”, “Mrs. Gandhi stoned at rally in India”, “Complaints About NBA Referees Growing Ugly”, and “Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax”.
Sometimes it is clear that the headline writer is having a bit of fun but others may be inadvertent. Either way, I enjoy them. They provide a welcome break from serious news.
Baby swallows fly.
Mano, have you tried the online Guardian cryptic crosswords (I do the weekday Cryptic and the Saturday Prize)? These days, they take up a good chunk of my time. Archived crosswords go back decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/cryptic
Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves.
How to tiptoe around someone and stay on the right side of them? (4-9)
Soft-pedalling?
Rob @#2,
I do the daily cryptic at the Toronto Globe and Mail and that already eats up enough of my time!
Okay, most of the linked list I can see where ambiguity lies, “to dog” vs “a dog” etc… but I can’t for the life of me figure out how “Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax” doesn’t involve a cow swinging an axe at a farmer…
7) @robert79: not sure if serious, but the farmer is the one with the ax?
Just yesterday I read a review that said, “This first volume has our protagonist, an experienced player who wants to clear 99 games named Yuki, involved in two such games.” Made me wonder why they gave all the games the same name.
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Yes, it’s funny, but these kinds of ambiguities, grammar errors, misspellings and malapropisms have proliferated to such an extent that it’s become really exhausting trying to parse people’s nonsense into what they actually meant to say. People write stream-of-consciousness now and never reread what they write before posting, and this includes people getting paid to write. I sometimes wonder if a hundred years from now anybody will even be able to understand anything written now (of course most of that will become lost or inaccessible when a massive emp wave wipes out all the digital archives). But I guess that would be true anyway, looking at how Middle English is a foreign language to most people now, and even the Constitution’s language can apparently be interpreted to mean whatever the reader wants.
@robert79: The “farmer with (an) ax” was injured by an enraged cow. It’s a bit of a grammatical fail, given that including the “an” would still make things ambiguous but easier to parse the way it was intended. But as Mano mentioned, newspapers often leave out a/an/the due to headline space constraints.
One of my SiLs writes cryptic crosswords for the Times as an amusement in her retirement.
I used to love doing cryptic crosswords, but these days I find trying to do them puts me to sleep after a few clues. It’s something about the frame of mind you need to get into, along with that meaning you are not thinking about any of the things that are worrying you.
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
I recently found out the title of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is a triple entendre that modern audiences don’t have the context for.
The surface meaning is obvious -- a lot of fuss over something of no consequence.
But it seems an Elizabethan audience would also parse “nothing” as slang for “vagina” -- so to their ears it would also come across as something like “getting fussy over pussy”.
But they’d ALSO be pronouncing “nothing” as a homophone of “noting” which they would understand as “gossip”.
And people think Shakespeare is stuffy & boring.
i think we can all agree with the Chancellor:
“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”
-- Chancellor Gorkon
In Namibia ostrich skins provide a valuable source of leather. One day a poster for the business newspaper proclaimed ‘ostrich skins falling’.
I mean, at one level I expect there’s an almost Gödelian effect here that any language capable of expressing the majority of human endeavours is going to have ambiguities.
On the other, what with English starting as a Germanic-Romantic halfbreed, with additions and imports from so many other languages in the world as the British Empire spread and ‘borrowed’ things it found useful, it is particularly fertile ground for such things because you can often have near-synonyms from different languages which will be used in different contexts. The word ‘stone’ is Germanic (stein), but for combining forms we normally use the Romantic version (peter/petra, e.g. petrify).
@15) Which reminds me again how the words for domestic animals (cattle/calf, pigs/swine, chickens, sheep) tend to be of Germanic origin, while the words for their meat (beef/veal, pork, poultry, mutton) are generally from French. The English serfs were in charge of the animals, while the French nobles were in charge of eating them. Oversimplified, yes, but basically true.
There are exceptions even in your list: cattle is of Latin origin, via French, not Germanic.
Chigau @11
An oldie but a goodie!
First you chop the tree down, then you chop it up!
I do find the oddities of English interesting. Why is there an order of adjectives? Why is “the big brown dog” ok but “the brown big dog” so wrong?
And what’s up with plurals? You could just specify how many you’re talking about. I picked three apple. Why not? Why does this sound so atrocious in in English?
Mind you, as pointless as plurals may be, better them than gendered noun classes. Sorry French and German, you could never have become the standard.
@ 18 file thirteen
There’s also that weird reversal of the plurals. I am not a grammar nerd so don’t know the correct terms, but what I’m referring to is, for example:
An individual believes in god (or not).
A group believe in god (or not).
The ‘s’ normally a plural signifier, is paired with the singular.
@ File Thirteen #18: There exist languages which have dual nouns in addition to singular and plural. There are also a small number of languages which have trial and/or paucal nouns. (Trial = three, as in tri; paucal = few/small number). If they have both, then typically they’re used on different object classes. It’s not unheard of for grammar rules to get really complex in some narrow areas.
As for adjective order, I’m guessing that’s common because it makes language processing a bit easier? But I don’t really know. But I’ve noticed that if you hear them out of order, there’s some unconscious tendency to assume the later word(s) are part of a noun phrase. Per your example, “the brown big dog” sounds like the “big dog” portion refers to something which is not actually a dog. Like the Boston Dynamics military robot, maybe.
SilentBob @19
I know what you mean, but I didn’t think it had any relation to plurals. Is that not just coincidence?
Talking of “be”: I am, you are, he/she/it is…
This is not an example of …whatever you think it is. Firstly, ‘believe’ is not being pluralised and so did not attract an s for that reason; in fact, it cannot be pluralised at all. You are perhaps thinking of belief ==> beliefs. Secondly, ‘A group believe in…’ is written incorrectly and is not an example of pluralising. It should be written as ‘The/this/that group believes…’ and it is not a plural simply because it includes the word group. It is singular -- a single thing, called a ‘group’, is being referred to. Yes group refers to multiple things -- it is a collective noun -- but it is still only a group.
One of headlines in rediff today was “I cant marry my daughter because I dont have money” -- It was quickly changed to “I cant marry off my daughter because I dont have money”
I should have also mentioned that there are also languages which don’t do grammatical numbers at all, so no singular/plural distinction. And as a further note, I would propose that the “is/are” split should be used to help distinguish singular and plural versions of you and they, so “you is / they is” would be singular and “you are / they are” would be plural. I suspect I would get virtually no takers for that proposal, given how powerful grammatical inertia is.
I am late to this very interesting discussion, but as I can read most of the Old versions of Germanic languages I have answers to many of these issues.
Because English has lost its gendered nouns, dative case, and most of the original inflectional endings, it maintains very strict word order so you understand what all those adjectives refer to.
Brown big dog sounds like the dog is named Brown.
English both Old and Modern uses something called fronting to change up the word order, often for dramatic effect.
Originally, the S is a noun ending for a singular possessive aka genitive. Volkswagen Thorsday
The/this/that group believes…
Believes is a verb. Beliefs is a genitive noun.
English strongly preserves genitive S but now also uses it for plurals. It also preserves the plural form of nouns
( mice, geese) but has lost the plural pronouns and inflections which go with them.
The verb ‘to be’ is vera in Old English. It’s one of few verbs that still has most of its original forms, albeit we are missing the words that would indicate gender in both singular and plural since modern English only uses the neuter case. ( mixed genders are grammatically neuter in Germanic languages) Sometimes it would be very handy to have one word that means multiple he’s or she’s are. Thessi(m) and Sja (f) are very useful.
Old English has a dual case. It is only used when speaking of two people, either við or vitt. One is for two of the same gender, and the other for two of different genders. English just has we are. Thank ye non-existent gods that English no longer inflects numbers for gender. I have spent far too many hours being stumped by such terms as Þhrym (3 men -Beowulf) and eitt (1 women -- Hervors Saga).
https://www.thoughtco.com/fronting-in-grammar-1690875