:unintended novelties

For a very long time, we’re talking 16 plus years here,  i was mistaken in my interpretation of the commonly said phrase ‘Holier than thou.’ in my ignorant and uninformed youth i believed the phrase to be ‘Holier than now’, this was always an intriguing phrase to me. because i never could fully grasp exactly the degree of holiness that now obtained, but seeing that people said this string of words so often i gave it the benefit of the doubt. i believed that if the masses could allow this strange and peculiar saying to be sensible than i could too. i went on saying ‘Holier than now’ im sure sounding pretty much as dumb as you can to teachers and fellow student. in fact im still a bit bitter that the cruel and soulless people around me took sixteen years to correct. nevertheless, one day i said this in front of a particularly affluent and equally assertive little girl. the embarrassing thing is that, as i have mentioned, i was eighteen years old, just a two small years from adulthood. anyway, this little ten year old brat has the audacity to call me out in front of a large group of people when i was at work, i looked like an idiot, i went through a brief period of time where i hated children and myself, but i got over it.

i would say that this error is both a comprehension and a production error. it is a comprehension error because i would have never been saying this phrase wrong, or at all, if i had not misheard it at some point. however, that said it must also be a production error because the actual error occurred when i was producing an utterance.

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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.

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Under “Latest News” on CNN.com one morning, I read the above headline and thought Wow! I can’t believe CNN would include their opinion of someone’s beauty in a headline, that’s unusual. Then directly below this headline I noticed that on the the list of “most popular videos” was the same piece, titled this: “Nude models on strike.” Oops. I think I interpreted the meaning of “striking” as “beautiful” partly because the word was describing a model. Had the headline been “Striking Garbage Men: ‘It’s a tough job’” I think I may have been less likely to make this mistake.

Also a likely contributor, I rarely (if ever) though of the word “striking” when trying to describe someone’s appearance until a few months ago, when we did an exercise in Rochelle’s creative writing course one day where the class listed as many possible ways to say pretty/beautiful, and someone put ’striking’ on the list. I know it became a highly activated word in my mind for sometime afterward, because I caught myself using it rather frequently thereafter.

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Yesterday, I was watching this show called My Big Redneck Wedding. The bride in this episode was in a touchy mood, and got offended when her groom said that she was “ingenious.” The groom asked why she was insulted, and she replied, “It means dumb.”

I can see why she interpreted it that way - it was really quite ingenious of her. She heard the prefix “in-” and thought it made “genius” mean the opposite, like in “intolerant” or “inanimate.”

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Here’s a case of linguistic ambiguity from a Reuters Headline last week, which I completely misunderstood and which took a long time to repair.

Normally, I think of the Coastguard as a unit that defends a country’s borders. When I hear of a military-like unit “striking”, I think of an airstrike, with bombs, guns, and damage.  When I read the headline, I was surprised to see that the Coastguard had begun conducting combat operations. It wasn’t until I got to the phrase “national minimum wage” in the 6th paragraph that the meaning finally jumped out at me!  This was a story about the Coastguard choosing to stop working for a while to bargain for higher pay.

I think this ambiguity was especially difficult to resolve because I didn’t believe the Coastguard was allowed to strike - in a work stoppage way. This was a story from Britain - maybe the rules are different in the US?

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Last night, I was on the phone with a friend who’d been in grad school with me. We were talking about the friendships you form in grad school and decisions some friends of ours have made to go back to school later in life.

When my friend said, “That’s why we keep our friends from grad school”, I completely misheard his intention. I interpreted the sentence to mean:

-  That’s why we keep our friends from going to grad school. [Meaning: grad school is tough. Any kind person would try to prevent their friends from suffering like that.]

What he meant was:

- That’s why we keep in touch with the friends we made in grad school. [Meaning: you form close friendships during difficult experiences, and it's important to maintain those friendships past graduation.]

This error is both a lexical ambiguity and a mis-parsing. “Keep” can either mean ‘to maintain’ or ‘to prevent’. If it’s used as ‘to prevent’, then you have to prevent someone from doing something, so ‘from grad school’ is a complement of the verb. If it’s used as ‘to keep’, then ‘from grad school’ is just additional information that tells you what type of friendships you maintain, so ‘from grad school’ is an adjunct.

Both interpretations were facilitated by context. In terms of frequency, I can’t verify which sense of “keep” is more common, but I’m going to assume that the ‘hold onto something’ sense probably occurs more often.

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I was on the phone with my boyfriend who lives in Florida while he was watching a University of Florida football game.  I asked him how Florida was doing, and he said that it had been a little rainy.  I had been talking about Florida in terms of their basketball team, and he thought I was talking about the state of Florida.  I thought this was interesting in terms of sentence prosessing, because he clearly retrieved a different meaning from the word “Florida” than I intended.

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