She Can Do It; She Can Help.

Unless there’s leftover pizza, Adam’s regular breakfast these days is Cheerios, bacon, and apple juice. Morning after morning I’ve read the weaselly claims on the Cheerios box about how it will can eliminate reduce help reduce your cholesterol levels, and Doug and I have had fun pointing out all the hedges that appear in the claims. Help in particular is one that I learned to watch for, back when we did the unit on advertising back in eighth grade language arts. Cheerios uses the word help a lot, but even so, I was more annoyed than usual to read it on the back of this box, where a woman is gushing:

I can help lower my cholesterol 10% in one month?

Part of my annoyance with this ad was the fake enthusiasm on this woman’s face, all because of this awesome news about her favorite cereal. More was from how the copywriters had finally crossed the line, entering territory where help ceases to mean anything. To be sure, help hasn’t meant anything for the non-savvy ad reader for years; it’s just the obligatory verb that introduces whatever more significant verb comes next: help fight, help reduce, help control, help increase, etc. Those who have been alerted to the tricky language, though, know that help means “we’ll do some of the work, but you have to work, too.” Wait, what am I talking about — doesn’t every English speaker know that’s what help means? Sure, but it’s just so common in advertisements, it tends to pass unnoticed.

However, the writers for this ad seem to have fallen for their own trick. This woman will can help lower her cholesterol. In other words: She can do it; she can help. Cheerios, I suppose, will can help her help herself.

This failure to take a change of point of view into account reminds me of people who record a message on their voice mailbox saying,

Leave a message and I will call you back at my earliest convenience.

To them, it apparently doesn’t sound like they’re saying, “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Maybe. If I feel like it.” All they know is that people who leave them messages say, “Please call me at your earliest convenience,” so they’ll honor that request by calling at their earliest convenience.

There’s another failure to mark a shift in point of view in an episode of The Simpsons (thanks to Heidi Harley for documenting this one):

Movie mucky-mucks: Look, we wanna buy this movie and we’re prepared to offer you anything!
Skinner: We’re prepared to accept anything!

Is there a term for this thing I’ve been calling “failure to mark a shift in point of view”? Any pragmaticists care to weigh in?

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We’re Saying the Same Thing Here!

Pneumonia

Adam’s been sick this week. The past couple of weeks, actually. In fact, he’s been sick for most of the year, with one sinus infection after another. He seems to get just well enough to go back to school and catch something else. His adenoidectomy during spring break was supposed to help, and maybe it will eventually, but the more immediate effect was interfering with his resistance enough for him to catch pneumonia. Now he’s on a five-day course of steroids, which has the effect of weakening his immune response even further, and keeping him up until midnight or so. We’re not sending him to school with all that going on, so he’s continuing to rack up absences, and any day now I reckon we’ll be getting the district-mandated letter expressing concern and hinting at consequences. Oh, well.

Adam signed up for soccer this spring, but has only been to one practice and none of the games the whole season. On Monday night as my wife and I were discussing Adam’s visit with the doctor earlier that day, part of our conversation went like this:

Her: Adam shouldn’t do soccer this week.
Me: It’s the last game anyway, and he hasn’t gone to any of the practices.
Her: Well, all the more reason for him not to do it.
Me: Right, and I’m not going to send him.
Her: We’re saying the same thing here!

She was right: We were both saying he shouldn’t go. So why did it feel like we disagreed?

Unfortunately, that was my fault. My wife’s message presupposed that I needed to be told that Adam shouldn’t do soccer, and I have to admit that it was a reasonable presupposition. All those times Adam got well enough to go back to school and catch the next thing? That was because of me saying, “OK, he’s been fever-free for 24 hours now, so he ought to go to school!” So when I said it was Adam’s last game I was countering not the at-issue proposition that Adam shouldn’t go, but the presupposed proposition that I might just send him out there. In other words, I was saying not so much that I wouldn’t send Adam to soccer, but that I hadn’t planned on sending him anyway. On the surface, we agreed, but under the surface, she was saying, “I’m telling you he shouldn’t go,” and I was saying, “No, I’m telling you he shouldn’t go!”

Don’t even talk to me about swine flu.

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Did I Join a Good Gym?

Not a picture of me

In December, I wrote about my confusion at an ad for a weight-loss system that had a satisfied customer saying, “I lost fifteen pounds! And kept it off for three years!” A commenter (regular reader Viola) wrote, “And for goodness sakes, Neal, I thought you’d literally lost 15 pounds!” Actually, I have lost about 15 pounds in the past year, and lowered my body fat by about eight percentage points. My wife made me go and buy new pants because my belt wasn’t holding up my old ones well enough. Unfortunately, I lost the weight by going to a gym, which puts you in a dangerous cycle. OK, not dangerous, but troublesome. As with narcotics, it takes more and more exercise to get the same effect, as your body gets more efficient at lifting the weights or running on the treadmill. And when Doug and Adam are sick and home from school, like they are today, I can’t go to the gym. The gym has a nice kids’ area (that is, a nice area for kids; mean kids aren’t excluded), but if I were to park Doug and Adam there on a school day, the attendant would probably ask me inconvenient questions, whose answer would be “Because they’re sick and can’t go to school.” So I stay at home, and that body fat percentage starts creeping right back up. Isn’t there some point at which I can ease off without the weight and fat coming back? Oh, I forgot: Fitness is a journey, not a destination. But like, journeys have ends, don’t they?

Anyway, about a month ago, I was at the gym, on my way to the bank of treadmills, when I noticed a woman sitting with one of the membership sales reps at a desk in the sales-closing area. I always have sympathy for the sales people there — I remember being in their situation many times when I worked at a ballroom dance studio. “Looks like he’s presented her the three membership plans,” I thought as I approached. “And now he’s probably asked her which one she wants, not whether she wants one, and he’s silently waiting for her answer.” As I passed, I thought, “I wonder if — hey, that’s Doug and Adam’s orthodontist!”

OK, she’s my orthodontist, too. I was not diligent in wearing my retainer back in high school, if you must know.

“Hi, Dr. Higginbotham!” I said. She looked up and waved, I continued to the treadmills, and she turned her attention back to the membership information. I wondered if she would sign up, or say she needed to go home and think about it.

A couple of weeks later, I was lying in the chair at the orthodontist’s office. As Dr. Higginbotham put on her rubber gloves, she asked,

So, did I join a good gym?

Had she joined a good gym? Well, for the answer to be yes, two things would have to be true. One, she would have to have joined a gym. Two, that gym would have to be a good one. I guess my gym’s OK, but that still left the first requirement.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you join?”

She affirmed that she had. As she poked around the wires and brackets, telling the technician to put a Class 2 box here and a chain there, I thought about how stupid my response had been. She wouldn’t have expected me to know whether she’d joined my gym. Heck, she wouldn’t have expected me to know whether she’d joined any gym. Furthermore, she already knew whether she’d joined or not. Clearly, she wasn’t asking for an answer to whether she had joined a gym. She expected me just to accommodate an addition to our common knowledge, to the effect that she had joined a gym, and not just any gym, but the gym where I had seen her. And that left the only part of the question I was competent to answer anyway: Was the gym a good one?

For that matter, she probably wasn’t truly interested in even that answer. If I thought the gym was a bad one, why had I been working out there? No, all she’d been doing was making conversation, and acknowledging the unusual circumstances in which we’d last seen each other. And in fact, I knew this as soon as she asked the question. But still I’d been sidetracked by the literal semantics of it. It’s part of my charm, I suppose.

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In Line at the Videogame Store

Two days after Christmas, I was standing in line at the video game store. I had taken Doug and Adam there to use a couple of gift cards they’d gotten for Christmas. So many other people were doing the same thing (except with their own kids and their own kids’ gift cards, of course) that the checkout line stretched away from the checkout counter to the opposite wall, turned and continued to the back wall, turned again and continued until it reached the wall that ran behind the checkout counter, and finally stopped about five feet away from the counter itself. Within five minutes of entering the store, I turned Doug and Adam loose to browse on their own while I took my place in the line. I wanted to serve my waiting-to-check-out-time and my waiting-for-the-kids-to-make-up-their-minds time as concurrent sentences.

I was pleased when a father and his teenage son joined the line behind me. (I’m always pleased when other people join a long line after me, and I always feel like a fool when I join a long line and remain the last person in it for the duration.) The father asked, “Does the line start here?” and I had a brief “I don’t know which end is front!” moment. I guess from the father’s point of view, the beginning of the line corresponds to the beginning of your waiting time, and ends where your wait ends. Under this view, a line is like a digestive tract, which starts where the food goes in and ends at the other end. The way I look at it is that if you tell someone who cuts in to go to the back of the line, then the other end of the line is the front, and like a book, the line’s beginning is its front. Also under my view, the people who have been standing in line longer are nearer its beginning.

Anyway, whichever way you look at it, I was somewhere near the middle of the line when I gradually became aware of a woman making her way along the line behind me, stopping every few feet to ask the people in line something. When she got to the my section of the line, she stopped again.

“Does anybody here want a DS?” she asked.

The teenager behind me couldn’t believe his luck. Some woman was looking to get rid of a Nintendo Dual Screen handheld game player! I was thinking maybe her kids had received one too many for Christmas, but still, I thought, it took a certain amount of moxie to walk into a place of business where video game systems were sold, approach its customers, and offer to cut them a deal on a used (or perhaps merely “pre-owned”) DS. Maybe she was even offering it for free. The teenager, however, didn’t ask questions. He just gave the woman an enthusiastic “Yeah!”

“Oh!” The woman gave an embarrassed smile. “Uh, I didn’t mean for free.” She went on to explain that there was only one DS left in stock, and before she stood in line to get it, she wanted to make sure she wasn’t wasting her time.

What she said wasn’t really ambiguous. The teenager and I both thought the woman wished to find out whether anyone in the line wanted a DS, and we were right. The communication breakdown came with our interpretation of the purpose behind her question. We took her question as a speech act of offering. The conditions were right: The woman presumably was not just asking out of idle curiosity, and it was shared knowledge that most people in the line wanted to acquire videogame-related items. The only condition that wasn’t common knowledge was that the woman possessed and was willing to give away (or sell cheaply) a DS, but that could be accommodated. After all, it’s often the case that when someone offers to do something, their willingness to do so has not been previously known. It was a little surprising, but not as surprising as some acts of kindness that have actually happened, like a customer at a diner leaving a million-dollar tip for their server, or someone donating a kidney to a stranger. And, as became apparent, the common speech act of an offer was a lot easier to imagine than the somewhat less common speech act of finding out whether anyone else is planning to buy something that you want and of which there is only one.

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I Lost 15 Pounds!

The Monday after Thanksgiving, I saw a full-page ad for a weight-loss system in the newspaper. The headline read:

I lost 15 pounds!

A typical testimonial from a satisfied customer. But then I read the next line:

And kept it off for three years!

That surprised me. As I understood it, the usual goal was not to regain weight you had lost. But here was a woman admitting that she had gained back her 15 pounds three years after losing it, and admitting it not in the fine print or “results may vary” disclaimer, but right at the top of the ad in 72-point type.

Then it occurred to me: Maybe she lost the weight three years ago, and therefore keeping it off for three years would put us at the present. All things considered, that made a lot more sense. But why did I gravitate to the commercially ridiculous reading, since she never actually said she had regained the weight?

It was the poor choice of verb tense she (or the copywriters) used. In English, if you’re talking about something that was true in the past and is still true now, you have the option of using the present perfect tense. If you kept 15 pounds from creeping back onto your frame for three years, and you are still doing so, saying I have kept it off for three years says this more specifically than I kept it off for three years. And by the principle of being as informative as you can while still being relevant, since the woman in the ad could have said that, she should have said that. That’s the rule her audience assumes she’s following, and as a result, when she said something that didn’t say specifically that those three years take us up to the present, the natural interpretation is that the keeping-off of the lost 15 pounds ended some time ago. So why would she have made such a personally unflattering statement?

Here’s what I think happened. The company probably had the ad all planned and laid out. They’d made sure to put in “And have kept it off for three years”, because they knew the perception among potential clientele was that people on this weight-loss program tended to lose weight for a little while but then gain it back. But at the last minute, there was a complication. Their satisfied customer had suddenly gained back the weight she’d lost. What could they do? They already had her “after” picture, and even if they had time to take a picture of and get a testimonial from another customer, none of their other customers had actually kept the weight off longer than a few months. So they made do with what they had, making a slight change in wording from have kept to just kept. They hoped the readers of the ad would not notice the odd choice of tense, or if they did notice it, would dismiss it, because why would they advertise that a customer had regained the weight she’d lost? That would be ridiculous!

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Pragmatics Practice

“Are you getting something to drink?” my wife asked me.

OK, that’s it. I need a pseudonym for my wife, like Better Half or Mrs. Semantic Compositions or something. I’d ask … my wife for a suggestion, but I don’t think she’d be too enthusiastic about helping, since she’s still waiting for me to come up with a pet name for her. In all the time we dated, all the time we were engaged, and all the time we’ve been married, I’ve never had a pet name for my wife. Not as a matter of policy; I just never happened to start calling her by a pet name. Maybe it’s part of my language acquisition that never fully took. (Yes, I admit it: Part of the last line in this story is a lie, a lie! )

Anyway, so where was I? We were getting ready to watch the third episode of the show my brother’s writing for, and my wife asked if I was getting something to drink. I said yes.

“If you decide to open a bottle of wine and wanted to pour me a glass, I wouldn’t say no,” she told me.

“Okay,” I said, and headed off to the kitchen.

I don’t think I want a glass of wine, I thought. I’m going to get me a tall glass of iced tea. Woohoo! I was off the hook for getting my wife a glass of wine!

On the other hand, I thought, as I cut the lemon … my wife didn’t say not to bring her a glass of wine if I was getting something else for myself. She probably wouldn’t mind if I brought her a glass of wine regardless of what I was having.

In fact, I reasoned further, she probably wants me to bring her a glass of wine. She was probably just trying to frame the request in a playful, not quite so demanding way. Maybe I ought to bring her a glass of wine.

So I did, and she called me honey and thanked me. Actually, she said, “You’re so sweet,” but since I’m pretty savvy with these indirect speech acts, I could tell it was an expression of thanks.

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Kathy Griffin, Pro Bono Divorce Attorney

In last week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, I read an article about one Kathy Griffin, who had a supporting role on a sitcom that I never watched, and who now has a reality show called My Life on the D-List. Near the end of the article, I read:

Whether you love or loathe Griffin’s obnoxious, self-absorbed persona, it’s hard not to appreciate the amount of work she puts into [her show]. Over the last two seasons, she came under mortar fire during a morale-boosting visit with soldiers in Iraq, met with women on death row, finalized a painful divorce, …

I thought, “Wow! She’s an attorney, too?” I wondered whose divorce she had finalized. Heck, if she was qualified to finalize divorces, painful or amicable (or both), why wasn’t she doing that full-time and making probably more money she would with a reality show and concert performances?

Then I came to the end of the sentence:

… and traveled to Ireland to spread the ashes of her father, who died in 2007. (Nicholas Fonseca, “The Most Polarizing Woman in Hollywood,” Entertainment Weekly, Jun 13, 2008, p. 38 )

That last verb phrase was what brought me around to realize that the painful divorce she finalized must have been her own. Since that makes more sense anyway, what was it that led me to the Kathy-Griffin-moonlighting-as-a-divorce-lawyer scenario? Reviewing the first two VPs in the list, I see that I was primed to expect selfless humanitarian deeds: boosting soldiers’ morale … visiting death-row prisoners … offering pro bono legal assistance to help battered women escape abusive marriages. But spreading the ashes of one’s father is definitely a personal rather than a charitable undertaking, and when I came to it, I was forced to recategorize the list, from noble acts to emotionally demanding acts in general.

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Maybe Rhyming Words Can Sound the Same

One of my favorite poems is Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”. I know at least one first-grade teacher who dares not read it aloud to her students these days, but I used to read it aloud a lot to Doug and Adam — both the Little Golden Books version that’s on loan from Mom and Dad (who used to read it to my sister Ellen), and a newer version that Jan Brett illustrated. I like that you can sing it to the tune of “Beep-Beep” and have it match right down to the repetitions at the end of each verse; that when Doug was a toddler he’d say “you elegant fowl” as “you elephant fowl”; and that piggy-wig is an exception to Steven Pinker’s rule on rhyming nonsense pairs.

However, I cannot abide Edward Lear’s limericks.

Caller-ID Pragmatics

Several years ago I head a phone conversation that started off like this. I answered the phone: “Hello?”

“Hi!” said a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. “Who’s this?”

“Uh, who’s this?” I responded.

The caller stood firm: “Who is this?” Now she sounded a little testy.

“I’m the guy who answered the phone when you called,” I said. “Who’s this?”

20 Questions, and Irreflexive In

Doug and Adam and I were playing 20 Questions while we waited for our food to arrive one night. The domain was places; the game went down something like this… [cue harp music]