You Took the Last Bus Home

A bit of light verse that passed my eyes on Facebook and pleased me with its playful exploitation of ambiguity In English. (It went on to serve as the title of the poet’s first book):

From the publisher’s (over-the-top) blurb:

You Took the Last Bus Home [2016] is the first and long-awaited collection of ingeniously hilarious and surprisingly touching poems from Brian Bilston, the mysterious [English] “Poet Laureate of Twitter.” [Bilston is the pseudonym of Paul Millicheap.] With endless wit, imaginative wordplay and underlying heartache, he offers profound insights into modern life, exploring themes as diverse as love, death, the inestimable value of a mobile phone charger, the unbearable torment of forgetting to put the rubbish out, and the improbable nuances of the English language. Constantly experimenting with literary form, Bilston’s words have been known to float off the page, take the shape of the subjects they explore, and reflect our contemporary world in the form of Excel spreadsheets, Venn diagrams and Scrabble tiles. This irresistibly charming collection of his best-loved poems will make you question the very essence of the human condition in the 21st century.

Ambiguity. The poem’s donée — you took the last bus home — is a startling ambiguity joke. Startling, because it subverts the obvious everyday understanding of this sentence, with take ‘use as a means of transportation’ (and an associated syntactic organization with the verb take occurring with two non-subject arguments: a direct object denoting the means of transportation and an adverbial denoting the goal of motion) in favor of a potential understanding (with take ‘remove from a place’ and a associated syntactic organization with two non-subject arguments: a direct objecting denoting the thing removed and an adverbial denoting the location it’s moved to) — an understanding that’s unlikely to have occurred to us because it’s real-world preposterous. In the real world, people don’t literally move objects like buses, trains, and cars (to take them home with them).

Now, ambiguities are everywhere — potential ambiguities lie within almost every expression — to the point where ambiguity looks like a (valuable) feature of language, not a bug in it (an idea that has been developed by others, notably Tom Wasow and his collaborators). Most ambiguity is lexical, attributable to lexical items or to larger fixed expressions, though — as here — often in concert with alternative syntactic organizations.

The crowning beauty of the poem is that the startling ambiguity in its first line is then matched by a sting in its tail, a similar ambiguity in its last line, you caught that train.

Details.

For the first sentence. For the expected everyday understanding, the verb sense, from NOAD:

take: 3 … [d] use as … a means of transportation: we took the night train to Scotland

As noted above, associated syntactic organization has the verb with two non-subject arguments: a direct object denoting the means of transportation (here, the last bus) and an adverbial denoting the goal of motion (here, home ‘to one’s home’).

For the startling verb sense, again from NOAD:

take: 2 remove (someone or something) from a particular place: he took an envelope from his inside pocket | the police took him away.

The associated syntactic organization has two non-subject arguments: a direct object denoting the thing removed (here, the last bus) and an adverbial denoting the location it’s moved to (here, home ‘one’s home’).

Compare the Beatles’:

You’re such a lovely audience / We’d like to take you home with us

For the last sentence. For the expected everyday sense of the verb:

catch: 4 reach in time and board (a train, bus, or aircraft): they caught the 12:15 from Chicago

The associated syntactic organization has one non-subject argument: a direct object denoting the means of transportation boarded (here, that train).

For the startling verb sense:

catch: 1 [a] intercept and hold (something which has been thrown, propelled, or dropped): she threw the bottle into the air and caught it again.

The associated syntactic organization has one non-subject argument: a direct object denoting the thing intercepted (here, that train).

This entry was posted on April 27, 2023 at 9:11 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Books, Humor, Poetry. 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.

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