422GG Manipulating Words to Make Things Funny
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2014
⏱️ 6 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Grimer girl here. Remember how last week we said that another whole thing is |
| 0:05.2 | different from a whole another thing? This week we're going to talk about |
| 0:09.9 | something similar. Sometimes a sentence doesn't quite end up where you're |
| 0:13.9 | expecting. For example a recent tweet by James Martin goes like this, a woman |
| 0:19.4 | gives birth in the UK every 48 seconds. She must be exhausted. Let's think about |
| 0:25.6 | that sentence again. A woman gives birth in the UK every 48 seconds. She must |
| 0:31.1 | be exhausted. The ordinary way to interpret the sentence is for a woman to mean |
| 0:37.0 | a different woman each time. But sure enough if you think about it for a second |
| 0:41.5 | it could also refer to the highly improbable scenario in which the same woman |
| 0:46.3 | gives birth 1800 times a day. At the risk of spoiling the joke let's look at |
| 0:51.9 | how it is that we can get two meanings out of this one sentence. A situation |
| 0:57.0 | that linguists refer to as scopol ambiguity. Let's go for a slightly simpler |
| 1:02.4 | sentence to make the two meanings more clear. The sentence everybody loves |
| 1:06.9 | somebody has two possible readings. In the first reading it's true about all |
| 1:12.3 | people that each of them has some person whom they love. But it's not |
| 1:17.6 | necessarily the same person. In the second reading there's some particular |
| 1:22.6 | person whom everybody loves. Another way of saying this is that in the first |
| 1:27.8 | reading we interpret the every is having scope over the sum for every person |
| 1:33.2 | there is some other person. While in the second reading we interpret the sum as |
| 1:38.5 | having scope over the every there is some person whom every other person |
| 1:43.4 | loves. So if we go back to the original sentence we can see the same two |
| 1:49.2 | readings going on. I'm going to paraphrase them to make it a little more |
... |
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