Archive for the ‘Modification’ Category

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Into the N1 of N2 rat’s nest

May 2, 2024

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s posting “N1 of N2”, where my central point was about two English NP constructions of the form N1 of N2; I claimed to be providing only

a compact [account] that covered the important facts [relevant to the example a variety of celebrations] but didn’t wander into the rat’s nest of related matters

Today is rat’s nest day. The fact is that English has a whole heap of constructions of the form N1 of N2, but only a few are relevant to that example; however, the number of relevant constructions is (by my current reckoning) four, not two; and some of these are related by the processes of historical change.

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Posted in Agreement, Constructions, Gender and sexuality, Modification, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Fresh Baby Meat Ravioli

August 15, 2023

In the everlasting battle between brevity and clarity, this grievous loss for the clarity side, in an Australian grocery skirmish, fought in the aisles of the Preston Market in Melbourne VIC some years back.

From Michael Palmer on Facebook yesterday, this photo of miniature ravioli, made with fresh fillo / filo / phyllo pastry (from Antoniou Fillo Pastry in Moorebank NSW — “specialists in Australia since 1960”), and filled with meat:


[MP, snarkily:] Locally sourced isn’t a problem, but free-range babies are difficult to come by these days

It’s hard not to read the four-word label as advertising ravioli made with fresh baby meat — when the intention was to advertise the ravioli as fresh and baby(-sized) and meat(-filled), or (in my words above) as miniature ravioli, made with fresh fillo pastry, and filled with meat.

Brevity stripped the label down to only four (non-compound) words, and then there was no hope for clarity. You can get it down to four words, but you’ll need more space:

Fresh Baby-Size [or Miniature, or Mini] Meat-Filled Ravioli

The noun baby as a modifier has to go, and there’s not much you can do about the order of the modifiers (since these follow an ordering on the basis of their semantics). But Fresh Mini Meat-Filled Ravioli isn’t much longer.

(MP found other images of this display, from other angles, with a dated version back in 2016 that refers to Preston Market.)

Posted in Ambiguity, Brevity vs. Clarity, Language and food, Modification | 1 Comment »

Classic joke #444

July 22, 2022

We might as well just give them numbers. (This particular joke is 2/3 of a devil.) From Verdant on my Twitter on 7/15/22, this old Shoe strip:


(#1) Body-location (of the tattoo) vs. event-location (of the tattooing); Verdant provides this as a comment on my 2/27/19 posting “Body-location, event-location”, where #444 appears in a One Big Happy strip and is traced back at least as far as the antique Joe Miller’s Jest Book

To which Verdant adds yes-I-said-yes Molly Bloom’s:

confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child

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Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Jokes, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Modifier attachment, Possession, Semantics, Syntax | 1 Comment »

The teen fugue

January 11, 2022

Yesterday’s (1/10) Wayno/Piraro Bizarro revives plays on fugue and minor (exploited in a 2012 Bizarro), plus (in the title FUGUE IN A MINOR) a clunky play on A the name of a musical key vs. a the indefinite article (which are visually identical in all-caps printing):


(#1) The cartoon figure is a version of the classic portrait of the late Beethoven — the Beethoven of the Grosse Fuge — looking stormily rebellious in a Romantic red scarf, tempered by an image of Johann Sebastian Bach — the great master of the fugue as a musical form — in the powdered wig characteristic of the 18th century (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The word plays are on fugue, musical (“this piece”) or medical (“drifted aimlessly”); and minor, musical (“A minor”) or chronological (“my early teens”, “a minor”).

A look back at the 2012 posting, which had a different play on minor (the minor of music or the minor of significance), and so provided no justification for Wayno’s title for #1, “The First Emo”, with its allusion to emo kids / emos, who stereotypically are sensitive, socially dissociated, rebellious teenagers. And then some reflection on the cartoon composer in #1.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Music, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

How does Wilderrama sleep at night?

September 4, 2021

From the tv series NCIS, Season 14 Episode 6, “Shell Game”, an exchange between the NCIS-Agent characters Tim McGee (played by Sean Murray) and Nick Torres (played by Wilmer Valderrama, whose name I am forever telescoping into the portmanteau-like Wilderrama) that turns on joking with senses of the interrogative adverb how — in McGee’s question “How do you sleep at night”, intended to convey modal + means how ‘by what means is it possible?’; and Torres’s response “On my back. Naked.”, conveying truth-functional + state how ‘in what state?’.


(#1) Torres and McGee in the NCIS episode “Love Boat”, Season 14 Episode 4

Then I turn to WV the man, as a hunk with a wonderful smile (two things I post about on a fairly regular basis), and as a performer with a notable actorial persona.

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Posted in Actors, Ambiguity, Errors, Faces, Facial expression, Modality, Modification, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Semantics, Telescopings | 4 Comments »

Ripped from the headlines

April 3, 2021

Well, actually, the headline — from CNN Politics, “Gaetz showed nude photos of women he said he’d slept with to lawmakers, sources tell CNN” by Jeremy Herb, Lauren Fox and Ryan Nobles yesterday — isn’t problematic, but very early in the body of the story, we get this:


(hat tips to Mike Pope and Michael Covarrubias on Facebook)

Which is.

I was (actually) shocked at the idea that congressman Matt Gaetz (R of FL) — admittedly, an extraordinarily arrogant bully with the contempt for ordinary people and customary social conventions so often displayed by children of privilege — would have sex with women on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Then I saw the ambiguity in modifier attachment and realized that what was alleged was merely deeply boorish behavior: passing around, wink wink nod nod, naked photos and videos of his sexual conquests to other legislators and their staffs.

Now, about that modifier attachment…

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Posted in Ambiguity, Modifier attachment, Semantics, Syntax | 2 Comments »

Treading down the thorny path

March 16, 2021

Two evergreen topics in grammar and usage: so-called “split infinitives”, where some usage critics have insisted that they must always be avoided, however unnatural the results of this avoidance are; and modifier attachment, where jokes are often made about one of the potential attachments, however preposterous the interpretation associated with this attachment is.

The two topics are connected through their unthinking devotion to dogmas of grammatical correctness: avoid split infinitives, avoid potential ambiguity. A devotion that leads adherents down the thorny path of usage rectitude to using unnatural syntax and entertaining preposterous interpretations.

But first, the thorny path. The (tough) counterpart to the (easy) primrose path.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Modification, Modifier attachment, Movies and tv, Peeving, Plays, Split infinitives, Stock expressions, Syntax, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »

secret cabal

January 13, 2021

(Hanging in my posting queue for some considerable time, but just as relevant now as then.

From John McIntyre on Facebook on 9/6/18:

Guardian writer refers to a “secret cabal” in the Trump administration. What other kind does he think there is?

The crucial point is the definition of cabal. From NOAD:

noun cabal: a secret political clique or faction: a cabal of dissidents.

That is, cabals are by definition secret, and secret cabal is pleonastic, so is to be avoided (in favor of plain cabal). The general principle is the Strunk / White Avoid Needless Words dictum. (Yes, we can dispute the applicability of the dictum in particular cases. More below.)

In my mental filing cabinet, the relevant drawer is labeled pilotless drone, after a specific example I discussed at some length back in 2007. Then, of course, the question will be whether my treatment of pilotless drones carries over to secret cabals

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Posted in Modification, Pleonasm, Semantics, Usage advice | 2 Comments »

A fresh approach to English dangling modifiers

December 29, 2020

Recently defended:

Control in Free Adjuncts: The “Dangling Modifier” in English by James Donaldson. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Edinburgh, 2020 (supervisors: Geoffrey K. Pullum and Nikolas Gisborn).

Donaldson presents a fresh approach to the topic, uniting a huge body of commentary on observed examples by reference to sentence processing in real time.

Below, the dissertation abstract and a “lay summary”. These are not (yet) for quotation: this is not yet the final form of the dissertation — as is common in academia, there will be some editorial revisions before final submission, though it’s to be expected that there will be no substantive changes. I provide the abstract and lay summary here because I think the leading ideas deserve to be heard and appreciated.

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Posted in Danglers, Modification, Processing, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Our reclusive pangolinists

May 4, 2020

On the dangler watch, a report by Ben Zimmer on 4/29 about this Reddit posting, which seems to have appeared without any preceding context:

TIL [Today I Learned] Due to their reclusive nature, scientists are unsure how long a pangolin lives in the wild.

(now entry Z4.87, coded SUB(due to)-I-EMB-3P, in my collection of examples)

The writer of Z4.87 was no doubt intending to write about the endangered animal the scaly anteater, or pangolin, and the creatures were paramount in their consciousness; and they also wanted to introduce an observation on scientists’ knowledge about pangolins. All of that is fine. But we can’t be mind-readers, and what they wrote fell afoul of a general strategy in sentence comprehension that leads even well-intentioned readers to understand, at least for a perceptible moment, the claim to be that scientists, not pangolins, are reclusive.

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Posted in Context, Danglers, Language and animals, Modification, Syntax | 1 Comment »

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