Consistently Behaving Beats Behaving Consistently

Not too long ago, somebody lost track of how low we were getting on cat food, and consequently somebody found themself having to buy whatever cat food they could find in an unfamiliar pet-supply store. After walking past the bins of live crickets in the “weird pets” section, I got to the dog section and saw this sign posted in the aisle:

We’ll help you train your dog to behave more consistently.

That could lead to trouble, I thought. Just imagine…

Customer: I want a refund for the money I wasted on this stupid training course!
Employee: I’m sorry you’re dissatisfied. Did the course not work for your dog?
Customer: Hell, no! Riley used to sometimes pee on the floor instead of barking to go outside, but now he always pees on the floor! He used to chew up the newspaper every now and then, but now he does it every single morning!
Employee: The training worked! Your dog is behaving in a much more consistent manner than he did before!

As Your President…

The day after tomorrow, I’ll have to make a choice that I haven’t been faced with for years: Which primary should I vote in? The last time my vote in either primary had a glimmer of a chance of making a difference was in 2000. That year, I registered myself as a Republican for the sole purpose of trying to keep George W. Bush off the November ballot by voting for John McCain. It didn’t work out so well.

Now that McCain is in all likelihood going to be the Republican candidate, maybe I’ll call myself a Democrat this year to have a say in the choosing of the Democratic candidate. Meanwhile, I’m still getting recorded calls from McCain, Clinton, Obama, and their friends. McCain started his pitch in one of them like this (after the introduction):

As your president, I promise to govern as a Reagan conservative.

I hope by that he doesn’t mean authorizing covert operations in defiance of Congress. But that’s not the linguistic point I wanted to talk about. I was interested in the As your president. When he said that, I naturally thought, “Wait! You’re not the president!” If he’d said any of the following, I wouldn’t have tripped:

• As your president, I will govern…
• As your president, I would govern…
• As your next president, I promise to govern…

In the first alternative phrasing, the future tense will govern fixes things up, since even though McCain isn’t the president now, he’s talking about a future situation when he will be. You can call the assumption optimistic or presumptuous depending on your attitude toward McCain, but it doesn’t leave open the objection that he isn’t president.

The next alternative phrasing is OK, too, with the conditional would govern. Of course, a campaign manager wouldn’t use this phrasing, since the conditional implies that McCain’s being elected is a remote possibility.

The third alternative phrasing works because even though promise is in the present tense, we’ve fixed things up by modifying the noun president with next, acknowledging that he’s not president now. As for the assumption that he will be, refer back to the first alternative phrasing.

Note that I didn’t say McCain’s actual script was ungrammatical. It was just confusing, because the normal way of interpreting a sentence-initial adverbial phrase like As your president is to take it as modifying the main verb of the sentence, in this case promise. But when you have another clause embedded inside the main clause, other possibilities open up. In this case, promise is followed by another verb, to govern, with I [McCain] as its understood subject. As your president can certainly modify govern; I just had to mentally paraphrase:

I promise to, as your president, govern as a Reagan conservative

The appearance of As your president at the front of the sentence, as if it had been moved all the way out of its embedded-clause home to the top of the main clause, is a case of what’s called adjunct extraction. (Adjunct, for our purposes, is synonymous with modifier, in this case an adverbial phrase.) Other things can be extracted out of deeply embedded clauses, too, like subjects and direct objects in questions:

• Who did John say that Sarah thought that Bill ordered [missing subject] to read the report?
• What did John say that Sarah thought that Bill ordered Jane to read [missing direct object]?

Extracting an adjunct is a little trickier, subject to more restrictions. The context has to be just right for it to work. The context here was mostly right. Right enough for me to arrive at the correct parse, but not enough for me to get there smoothly. But I guess the campaign managers figured a split-second of confusion was worth being able to have their candidate say, “As your president, I….”

Contrast this with a funny piece of direct mail I got a couple of months ago, before Obama’s winning streak was in full swing. It was a “census” sent by the RNC to registered Republicans such as myself just to, you know, assess how the nation’s Republicans felt about important issues so they could adjust their policies accordingly. For example, they wanted to know if they should “do everything we can to stop Democrats from repealing critical border and port security legislation?” There’s enough material in there for four or five posts, so this census may show up here again. The item relevant here is this one:

And if we are on the wrong side when the votes are tallied, our agenda will be demolished and America will take a disastrous turn to the left–your taxes will skyrocket as our economy grinds to a halt; the federal government will expand into every nook and cranny of society; Senate Democrats will rubber stamp every radical left-wing judge Senator Clinton sends them for confirmation for the Supreme Court.

Wow, that’s pretty serious. Not taxes skyrocketing while the economy races forward, or taxes down while the economy grinds to a halt (like now), but both. And I didn’t think there were too many nooks and crannies left for the government to expand into after the likes of the Patriot Act–though as Shakespeare said, “The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” (King Lear, Act IV, Scene I). Senate Democrats (but not Republicans) will rubber-stamp (not debate and sometimes approve) every radical left-wing judge (not just radical, not just left-wing, but radical and left-wing; note also the invited inference that the number of such judges will be greater than zero, and will in fact be equal to the total number of nominated judges) Senator Clinton sends them–

Whoa! Now I’m not a Constitutional scholar, or even a serious Constitution buff like Glen or his friends Tom and DGM, but I am pretty confident that senators do not nominate judges for the Supreme Court. To make this sentence Constitutionally accurate, they need to say something like President Clinton or current Senator Clinton. Or maybe even President Obama.

He Ordered the Tapes to Be Destroyed

I watched some of the news this morning, and saw correspondent Andrea Mitchell talking about the illegally erased torture videotapes at the CIA. I was very interested to hear if anyone has been arrested for this outrage, or at the very least fired. Needless to say, I’m still waiting. The first line Mitchell spoke was about some arrogant bastard (not her words) in the CIA who had ordered the destruction. I didn’t catch the name, though I’m guessing it was Jose Rodriguez. Anyway, she said:

[Whoever it was] ordered the tapes to be destroyed.

When she said that, I pictured someone standing in front of a stack of videotapes and barking out, “Attention, all you videotapes! This is an order! Be destroyed!”

I Love The

Since October, Doug and Adam’s piano teacher has been assigning them exclusively Christmas songs. Each week she’s assigned a couple more, and told them to keep playing the ones they’ve mastered so that they can play them at an informal recital. By now they have a repertoire of about a dozen songs each, but Doug strives to do his daily practice in the same amount of time as he took when he tackled his first two Christmas songs. He’s been treating us to “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “Joy to the World” as fast as he can play them. As loud as he can, too. It’s even weirder when he plays his fast, loud versions of “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger.”

Ah, yes, “Away in a Manger.” The song I played a crummy rendition of on the xylophone in front of my second grade class. Source of “till morning is night”. And come to think of it, source of another misheard lyric.

Pierced Earrings

“These are nice,” my wife said, clicking on the thumbnail image. Up came the larger image of a pair of earrings. My wife had come over when she saw that I was online, had had me navigate to the webpages for a couple of online stores, and was now pointing out stuff like this. She does that every now and then at this time of year, though you’d think after more than a decade of marriage, she’d know that I’m not going to wear earrings or necklaces. This pair of earrings was interesting, though. The caption called them pierced earrings.

“Oh, I know what’s next,” you’re saying. “He probably thought the earrings were supposed to be pierced, instead of making the obvious connection that they were for pierced ears, as opposed to being clip-on earrings.”

Choose to Make Good Choices

Doug and I were reading the rule book for his school earlier this month. We had to sign a form saying we’d each read and understood it, so we read every last page of it over the course of a few suppertimes. Ah, yes, I remember it like it was just a few weeks ago…

We’d reached the section on playground rules. “Hmmm…” I said. “‘Students must go up on ladders.’ So, does that mean if you want to go up, you have to do it on a ladder? Or does it mean that if you are on a ladder, you can only go up and not down?”

Hard-Working, Reliable, Professional, and Friendly People: One Set, or Four?

My wife’s favorite ice cream shop is the unique-to-Columbus Jeni’s Ice Creams. (Not Jeni’s Ice Cream, but Jeni’s Ice Creams. There’s probably a reason for the plural, but I’ve never bothered to find it out.) My wife usually gets the salty caramel flavor, while I favor the lime cardamom and the chocolate gelato, together on one cone. One time I tried the signature flavor of Queen City cayenne, but gave up before I even reached the rim of the cone. My mouth would be burning, so I’d take another lick of ice cream to soothe it, and start the cycle over again. Anyway, as I was working my way through the lime down to the chocolate during one of our visits, I noticed an announcement on a chalkboard on the sidewalk. It said:

Now hiring hard-working, reliable, professional, and friendly people!

Only Weeks Later

I was reading an article in the paper on the latest information to come out on the friendly-fire killing of Pat Tillman, and its infuriating cover-up. At one point the article says, “The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire.” It then states:

Only weeks later did the Pentagon acknowledge he was killed by Rangers.

At first I misread it, and thought it said:

Only weeks later, the Pentagon acknowledged he was killed by Rangers.

What a difference!

Make Like a Tree!

There’s a Monty Python sketch where John Cleese plays a detective with some kind of aphasia. He enters a room and tells the occupants:

I’m afraid I must not ask anyone to leave the room. No, I must ask nobody … no, I must ask everybody to… I must not ask anyone to leave the room. No one must be asked by me to leave the room.

After a few more sentences that get less and less coherent, he finally manages to produce a string that conveys the desired meaning, or at least something sufficiently close:

Everyone must leave the room… as it is… with them in it.

You Don’t Have to Be Literal-Minded to Be Funny!

And yes, I know: Just because you’re literal-minded doesn’t mean you’re funny. Now that that’s out of the way…

When I was a kid, there were one or two occasions when a school librarian or a teacher or someone read the class a book about Amelia Bedelia. I thought they were OK, but not interesting enough for me to seek out any others to read. However, I read several more of them a few years ago, not just because I now have kids to read them to, but because these books are often specifically recommended as a good way for parents to teach kids about autism. The reason is that most of the humor in the books comes from Amelia Bedelia taking things literally. In almost every description or review of these books, this trait of Amelia Bedelia’s is brought up, and very often it’s true. I’m surprised I never noticed it in the one or two A.B. books that were read to me as a kid. All I remember thinking is, “Ha, ha, Amelia Bedelia sure is dumb!”

But one thing nags at me a little bit when I read these reviews or recommendations that talk about how literal-minded Amelia Bedelia is.