High-Frying Ambiguity

Larry Horn sent a message to the American Dialect Society’s mailing list this morning, with the following headline that a colleague had brought to his attention:

McDonald’s fries holy grail for potato farmers

I showed it to Doug, who was home with a fever, and he and I laughed and laughed over McDonald’s having found, and fried, this holiest of artifacts.

Not too long afterward, Ben Zimmer posted a message thanking Larry and noted the headline over at Language Log, where several of the comments have brought out exactly what properties of English, and in particular headline-ese, made this ambiguity possible. If you want, you can read through the (at time of this writing) 20 comments there and get the same information as you’re going to get here, but I’m going to write it up anyway, with all the contributing properties discussed in a single place.

Family Owned and Imitated

A tire shop that opened a year or two ago puts funny messages on its marquee. They’re so funny that I can’t seem to recall any of them right now, except of course for the one I’m going to tell you about now. It said:

Family Owned and Imitated

Family owned: So a family, let’s call them the Smiths, owns this business. Family imitated: A family (presumably the Smiths again) also imitates this business. The Smiths imitate their own business? How is that possible? Maybe it’s like that that Greek family I read about. They ran a chocolate shop in nearby Granville for years, but then had a falling out, so that there are now two chocolate shops, run by two branches of the same family, located within two blocks of each other in downtown Granville, each claiming to possess the truest version of the family’s recipes for chocolate confections.

But never mind that. I’m pretty sure all they’re saying is that this business is family-owned, and that it’s imitated. This reading makes sense: Lots of businesses say that they’re imitated, usually before a warning that they’re never equalled or duplicated. In this reading, the coordinated elements are family-owned and imitated, as illustrated on the left.

To get the reading that leads you to imagine a rift in the family, you have to parse it with just owned and imitated as the coordinated elements, with family applying to both, as illustrated on the right. So why did I want to parse it this way, anyway, since it gives the weird and unlikely reading?

It’s at least partly because of the common collocation that the sign is harking to: Family Owned and Operated (or sometimes, family owned and run). In those phrases, family is clearly intended to form a compound with both owned and operated, as in the diagram. After all, who’d want to say that a family owns some particular place of business, and that (get this) someone operates it? If it’s open at all, the latter claim is obvious, and stating it violates the principle of Relevance. Only if it’s taken to mean “family-operated” does the statement say something useful: The fact that some place is run by the family that owns it might not be obvious to the casual observer.

By using this recognizable phrase as their point of departure, they primed me to parse Family Owned and Imitated in the stupid way. Now that I think about it, though, family owned and operated could be useful as a deceptively ambiguous phrase, for a family that has recently contracted out the operation of its family business but doesn’t want to change the wording in their advertisements. I wonder if that’s been done. Do any of you know of businesses that advertise that they’re “family owned and operated”, and are operated by someone other than the family?

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More Beatles Ambiguity

All the talk about Beatles lyrics a few posts ago reminded me of an ambiguity in one of their songs that I’ve wondered about for years. For my twelfth birthday, Mom and Dad gave me an LP of the anthology The Beatles: 1962-1966. I remember sitting in the easy chair in the den, reading the liner notes while I listened to the record. One of the tracks on disc 2 is “Michelle”, in which Paul McCartney addresses the exclusively Francophone object of his affection. The trouble is that McCartney doesn’t speak French, or at least not enough to have mastered the complicated syntax of je t’aime. Instead, he has to make do with the simple sentence “Michelle, ma belle” sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, which means “Michelle, ma belle [my pretty] are words that go together well”. Here, you can listen for yourself:

The French wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know it anyway, so I just went with it (although once I took French in high school I realized that where the liner notes had les mots it should be des mots). The line that stopped me was this one:

I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand.

Singing Long with the Beatles

As I was driving to the SALT conference last weekend, a song by the Beatles came up on my iPod. It was “I’ll Follow the Sun,” and as always, I found it disconcerting how Paul McCartney tries to sing gone to rhyme with sun in the line:

One day, you’ll look and find I’ve gone.
But tomorrow may rain so I’ll follow the sun.

He doesn’t sing it as [gɔn] (i.e. “gawn”) and forget about trying to rhyme it. Nor does he sing it as [gʌn] (“gun”) to rhyme with sun and forget about trying to be faithful to its pronunciation. He sings it somewhere in between, with a vowel that doesn’t sound quite like English. That disconcertion (disconcertation? disconcert?) is quickly pushed aside by the one that follows in For tomorrow may rain. “Tomorrow may rain”? Can you do that? The only subject I can have with rain is the dummy subject it, unless you’re saying something like “I’ll rain destruction on you!” Checking the CoCA, I see that occasionally the precipitation itself is the subject, as in “I don’t got enough problems dealing with the day-to-day shit that rains from the sky in Manhattan.” Usually it’s precipitation other than rainwater; the examples I saw also included blood and mirror shards. But no tomorrow will rain, yesterday rained or today’s raining. So when I hear the song, I keep trying to hear a very short it squeezed in there that maybe I just didn’t hear all the other times. This time, though, I just didn’t feeling up to doing that, so I jumped to the next song.

What do you know? It was another one by the Beatles. This time it was “From Me to You.” If you haven’t heard it (and even if you have, of course), it goes like this:

All Over

While I was doing the grocery shopping today, I could tell by the music playing that Sunday afternoons were exactly when the grocery stores expected people my age to be shopping. They were playing “You Got It All” by a group called the Jets, whom I’ve never heard about since then. I’ve now learned that Britney Spears did a cover of it in 2000 on her Oops! I Did It Again album. This song that usually prompted me to change the station back when I heard it on the radio in the 1980s. It wasn’t just that it was slow and boring with an aimless melody, though that was most of the problem. It was that plus the fact that the song was apparently written by someone who thought it was classy to compare your new boyfriend to your old one — with lines like “You’re all that he’s not” and “Don’t let him worry you so.” Being compared to an old boyfriend, even favorably, makes me squirm.

The one redeeming feature of the song was the smile it gave me when circumstances conspired to make me listen to the chorus. Or at least, I think it was the chorus. Melodically, it was hard to distinguish it from the rest of the song, but the words were repeated. It went like this:

You’ve got it all over him.
You got me over him;
Honey, it’s true, there’s just you.
You must have been heaven-sent,
Hearing me call, you went out on a limb.
And you’re all that he’s not,
Just look what I got,
‘Cause you got it all over him.

“You got it all over him,” I would think. “And now he has to wipe it off!”

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Cute as a Button in the Eye

We went to see Coraline last week. It’s an OK movie; it does a good job at setting a creepy mood, but even by its own internal logic, it doesn’t quite make sense (unlike, for example, Monsters, Inc. or the Toy Story movies). One of the best scenes has Coraline’s “Other Father” in a parallel world improvising a song in her honor. It’s an upbeat, catchy melody, which I learned in the end credits was written and performed by They Might Be Giants (you know, the guys who did “(You’re Not the) Boss of Me“). Here, see for yourself:

If you’ve seen the movie, or even just the previews (or read the graphic novel the movie is based on), you know that one of the unsettling details of the parallel world that Coraline visits is that all its inhabitants have buttons instead of eyes. They Might Be Giants have cleverly alluded to this fact in the line that goes:

She’s cute as a button in the eyes of everyone who ever laid their eyes on Coraline.

I love the syntactic ambiguity here. More specifically, it’s an attachment ambiguity. In the normal reading, the prepositional phrase in the eyes of everyone who ever laid their eyes on Coraline functions as a sentential adverb, modifying the sentence She’s as cute as a button, as shown in the diagram on the right.

However, anyone who has been watching the movie up to this point is well primed to parse the prepositional phrase as modifying the noun button, as illustrated in the diagram on the left. Ordinarily this parse would be unconsciously discarded, in the same way as we’d never even think about parsing Kim disassembled the TV with a flat screen to mean that Kim used a flat screen to disassemble the TV. But in the context of the movie, both parses are salient, and both make sense (as long as you’re willing to stretch the meaning of in to include in place of, or on if you imagine the buttons to be placed on top of the eyes).

The only flaw in the exploited ambiguity is the clash between the singular a button and the plural the eyes. It’s hard, even impossible I’d say, to get a wide-scope reading of the eyes, so that we’re talking about one button for each eye. I keep thinking about a single button that is somehow in (place of) both eyes at once. That’s an extragrammatical correction you just have to grant in the name of artistic license.

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Only the Manly

“You’d never catch me sticking my bare hand down a hole like that!” Laura said, as she ran the clippers over the back of my neck. Jim and Stan, two of the other barbers, were sitting in the waiting chairs talking about an outdoor activity that I’d never heard of called noodling. Noodling, I learned, was the sport of catching catfish with just your hand, usually by sticking it into a likely-looking hole in a creek and, if you were lucky enough for a catfish to bite it, pulling out the catfish by its jaw. Part of the thrill was not knowing what might be in one of these holes. Instead of a catfish, it might be nothing at all, or a muskrat, or a snapping turtle. In fact, Stan said, the guy who’d introduced him to noodling was missing a finger — because of an incident involving a gun that he’d picked up by putting his hand over the muzzle.

Then talk turned to the snowstorm we had last week, the one that canceled two days of school for Doug and Adam. That got me to thinking about how many of the allotted “calamity days” for the school year had been used, and while I was doing that, I missed what Jim said next. Laura laughed and I came back to the present.

“Did you hear what they said?” she asked. “Jim and Stan and Harry all came to work that day, but Len was snowed in. So Jim said that only the manly men came in.”

“Ha!” I laughed, and then thought. Hmmm…

Only the manly men came in.

Laura seemed to be speaking from firsthand knowledge when she told me that Jim and Stan and Harry had come in. It sounded like she’d been able to make it to work that day, too. So if my intuition was right, it was not true that only the manly men came in: Only the manly men and Laura had come in!

Warriors: Ambiguity

I’m noticing that Doug and his mom share a perverse characteristic. Once they come across a book series that they like, they will not rest until they have read every last book that author has written. They won’t space them out, intersperse them with other books to make them last. They’ll read them one after another after another until none are left. I can’t even get my wife the latest book by a favorite author for a gift, because she’ll have read it within a month of its publication already.

Doug, for his part, has finished all the books in the Redwall series he was reading a couple of months ago, and is now busily devouring the feline fantasy meta-series Warriors by Erin Hunter (who is actually three authors writing under one pseudonym). I’ve seen this series take up more and more bookstore shelves in the years before Doug discovered it. They come out so frequently that (Doug has noticed) the editing has sometimes been a bit lax. There are the occasional typos, but sometimes they will refer to a character by the wrong name. And then there was this line in one of the latest ones Doug read:

“Are you coming in?” he meowed. “We have to make sure everyone’s eaten.”
Warriors: The New Prophecy: Dawn, 2006, p. 323

When Doug read that, he stopped short, thinking “Wha–? Everyone’s eaten?” The cats in these books are very territorial, and often fight, but cannibalism was a line they hadn’t crossed yet. Shoot, these cats don’t even mark their territory with urine (at least not in the pages of the books), so this line was quite a surprise. Doug had to read it a couple more times before it made sense: “Oh! Everyone has eaten!” Once he identified the ambiguity of Everyone’s between “Everyone is” and the intended “Everyone has”, he did the right thing: He brought it to me. Good catch, Doug!

The line could have been even harder to parse if it had been something like this:

We have to make sure everyone’s eaten and ready to go.

Ridiculous, you say? I’ve seen it happen:

But depending on the day, they’ve already been outside, or it’s pouring and they can’t go out, or it’s midwinter and been dark since five.
Paula Spencer, “Why I Love TV,” Parenting, June/July 2000, p. 212

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Kilpatrick’s Rule Works Only Sometimes

It’s January, and you know what happens in January, right?

Yes, yes, of course there’s the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. That goes without saying. And of course, the concurrent meeting of the American Dialect Society, with its annual, headline-grabbing Word of the Year selection. I meant the other thing that happens in January: the publication of James J. Kilpatrick’s annual column on only! Here’s how it begins this year:

Every January for 20 years I’ve written an “only” column. The theme’s the same: No little dog trick of the writer’s art will sharpen your style quite so effectively as the proper placement of “only.” And its mastery is no trick at all.

The annual illustration remains the same. Several schoolboys get into a fistfight. They are hauled off to the principal’s office. There we learn that (1) only John hit Peter in the nose, (2) John hit Peter only in the nose, (3) John only hit Peter in the nose, and (4) John hit only Peter in the nose. The elements of the offense are now clear. Punishment may be fairly administered. Justice has been served.

The trick is to snuggle the limiting “only” as closely as possible to the noun [sic] it modifies. It works every time.

Kilpatrick’s example is clever, and does illustrate the difference that the placement of only can make. And when he says to put only as close as possible to the noun it modifies, I’m sure he meant word, since Kilpatrick certainly knows that hit is a verb, and in a preposition. The trouble is that Kilpatrick’s rule doesn’t work every time. (And when I say it doesn’t work every time, I mean that it is not the case that it works every time, not that it never works.) He is assuming, and leading his readers to believe, that the only things that only can modify are words. In fact, it can modify whole phrases. Allow me to repeat some of what I said in my review of Grammar Girl’s book. (If Kilpatrick can recycle chunks of his material, so can I. And I don’t even get paid for it!)

[I]n the entry on misplaced modifiers, Fogarty gives these two sentences:

Squiggly ate only chocolate.
Squiggly only ate chocolate.

Both sentences are grammatically correct, but they don’t mean the same thing. Fogarty argues that the second sentence means “all Squiggly did with chocolate was eat it. He didn’t buy, melt, or sell it. He only ate it.” Indeed, it can mean this—if you say it with the emphasis on ate. However, it can also mean that all Squiggly ever did was eat chocolate; he never played baseball, wore sweaters, or drank cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. How will you know the difference? By intonation and context. And this where Fogarty falls into the same trap that ordinary grammar mavens fall into: In spoken English, intonation is part of the grammar that tells you what only is restricting. In only ate chocolate, the word only can apply to just the verb ate (Fogarty’s reading); to the entire verb phrase ate chocolate (my alternative reading); and indeed, to just the direct object chocolate (the supposedly incorrect reading that means the same as Squiggly ate only chocolate). Certainly, if you can reduce ambiguity in your writing by judicious placement of only, you should do so, but there are cases where ambiguity persists regardless of how carefully you position the only. Fogarty’s failure to recognize this could confuse readers who wonder why Squiggly only ate chocolate can’t mean that all he ever did was eat chocolate, and leave them less confident than before on how to handle only.

Similar comments apply to only hit Peter in the nose.

Aside from the ambiguity that can’t be eliminated by careful placement of only, there’s another ambiguity in Kilpatrick’s example that can be eliminated this way. In his sentence (4), only is not modifying just the preposition in — unless we allow that it needs to be established that John hit Peter in the nose, not above it, below it, or around it. But of course, that’s unrealistic, you say. When would a situation ever arise where we had to make a distinction like that? I agree, not often; but Kilpatrick is all about precision in getting exactly the meaning you want when you use only. If he wants only to narrow down just what parts of Peter’s body John hit, he should follow his own advice and put only as close as possible to the noun it modifies, and write John hit Peter in only the nose. Now Kilpatrick could respond: “Only is limiting general regions of the body: in the nose as opposed to in the stomach, on the ears, or about the head and neck.” That’s fine. In that case, only is modifying neither the preposition nor the noun, but the entire prepositional phrase. And if you recognize (once again) that only can modify an entire phrase, then you have to admit that it’s syntactically ambiguous whether this particular only is modifying just the in that it’s next to, or the entire in the nose that it’s next to.

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Your Favorite Covered Dish or Dessert

“What do you suppose we should bring?” my wife asked me.

“I know,” I said. “We can get rid of those canisters of Cub Scout popcorn.” I couldn’t very well go around the neighborhood with Adam asking people to buy popcorn to help out his Cub Scout pack without buying some myself, but now we had two canisters of caramel popcorn sitting in our pantry. Not to mention the canister of chocolate-covered popcorn left over from the three we bought last year. I didn’t want to open them because if I did, I’d eat it all in one day, and erase days of progress from the gym. We could bring them to my sister-in-law’s party and kill two birds with one stone.

“OK, but we need to bring something else, too,” my wife said. (So much for my clever idea.) “The invitation says to bring your favorite covered dish or dessert, why don’t I make up those brownies? That’ll be easy.”

“Hey wait,” I said. “Are brownies your favorite dessert? She didn’t say to just bring any old dessert or a dessert that was easy to make; she said to bring your favorite.” My wife likes brownies, as do I, but carrot cake is a better candidate for her favorite dessert. Mine is lemon meringue pie, but danged if I wanted to spend my day making a lemon meringue pie that I’d have to share with other people! But my wife found a loophole.