Building a coffin.
I used to be in a hip-hop band. The man who produced our record was a carpenter by day and ran a studio out of his basement. One night, while recording our album, our DJ showed up to the studio incredibly late and quite frustrated. He told our producer that his life would be made much easier if only he had a coffin. Our producer, the carpenter, then spent the next hour talking to our DJ about building him his very own coffin. The producer was speaking of the wooden box used to house corpses. The DJ was speaking of the wooden box that carries turntables and mixers and everything else a DJ needs in one convenient and portable package.
The word coffin was semantically associated (to the DJ) with turntables and not with death. To the producer, who was not aware of the DJ tool, the word coffin could only mean the box for the deceased. I could have disambiguated everything for both of them, but instead i sat back and laughed to myself. It was surreal watching our DJ’s spirits raise as he thought he’d be getting a hand crafted DJ coffin all the while our Producer was becoming frightened at our DJ’s excitement towards getting a personal body box. Does that make me a terrible person? they figured it out eventually.
a beautiful case of linguistic ambiguity. Do you remember the semantic cue that forced them to recognize they weren’t talking about the same thing?
It was when they began speaking about the demensions of the coffin to be built. Our Producer kept trying to correct the DJ on the specifics. Our DJ said that he wanted the coffin to be 6-8 inches deep. The Producer, still convinced that he was referring to the body box, continued to emphasize that a 6-8 inch deep coffin would be good for nothing but decoration. At least 2 feet would be necessary (especially if he were to line it with padding, as coffins generally are) And who wants a body box for a display piece? Eventually the DJ caught the ambiguity and clarified the meaning of “coffin.”
its sort of funny that you had a producer who was unaware of the business enough to be able to make this error. you would think most producers have enough know how about the business to be able to disambiguate this mess.