Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From a Stanford student, this xkcd:

What I said to this student:

What makes the xkcd so challenging is that it’s an instance of a kind of conversational exchange that has been very little studied (if at all) — called in American street language, “messing with someone’s mind” or “yanking someone’s chain” (closely related: British “having someone on”). It involves saying something that is thought-provoking but not perceptibly appropriate to the situation at hand (so, on the face of it, just false) — often communicated with a formulaic expression (like “no pun intended” or “pardon my French”) attached. It’s a form of aggressive teasing… [ I just hate aggressive teasing]

In the xkcd case, the recipient has been tricked into spending hours fretting to make real sense of the original.

The Stanford course has developed to the point where the students are exploring old topics in new ways and introducing new topics and examples. In general, I don’t feel comfortable writing about these on this blog, at the moment and without the student’s permission. Maybe later. But in this case, I’m relaying some of my advice, not exposing a student’s ideas.

This entry was posted on February 11, 2014 at 7:11 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.