Archive for the ‘Salience’ Category

Checking out

March 6, 2026

A standard notice from the Instacart home-delivery service about a grocery order in progress from the Safeway supermarket:

You’ve still got time to shop
Add items until your shopper checks out

The intent is to convey the oldest intransitive phrasal verb check out: you can add items until your shopper has completed their search for items, informed the service of this, and left the store — 1b in the OED list below. But there are three other readings for check out, and the one that came to my twisted mind first was 4c ‘to die’. Evoking images of the fatal grocery order, which will never get delivered because the shopper dropped dead. (Presumably, the 4c reading had recently come by me in some other context, so it was somehow salient to me; my imagination is not normally so dark.)

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Posted in Ambiguity, Context, Intention, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Salience | 4 Comments »

At the zeugmoid laundry

December 3, 2025

A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:

If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]

(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using  the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:

If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]

[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.

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Posted in Context, Figures of speech, Humor, Modality, Pragmatics, Salience, Zeugma | Leave a Comment »

Alaskan prime

January 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month January and the year 2025

From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday. One fact that you need to know about CW is that she lives in Fairbanks AK (further facts, about CW and about Alaska, will become relevant as we go on):

Soft-spoken barista in a medium-loud café, as heard by me: … and would you like salmon on top of your cappuccino?

The barista said cinnamon, CW heard salmon. Phonologically similar, but from two different conceptual worlds. Why would CW even have entertained the possibility that the barista was offering salmon?

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Posted in Context, Errors, Holidays, Mishearings, Misreadings, Perception, Psycholinguistics, Salience | Leave a Comment »