SC and Mrs. SC went to dinner this evening at a trendy pan-Asian restaurant. To be frank, it was just OK. But as your host devilishly remarked as he signed the bill, "I may not have gotten a good meal out of this, but I'm getting a post!". What caused this comment?
Mrs. SC only ate about half of her meal, and requested a box for the remainder. When she did so, the waiter replied, "I can box it for you". Mrs. SC then told him, "That's fine". Upon the waiter's return to the table, he handed her a box and left. Mrs. SC was surprised.
"Wasn't he going to box it for me?", she asked. "No, you told him not to", replied SC.
The confusion stems from the ill-defined polarity of the phrase "that's fine"; we've addressed this before with regard to the question, "do you mind?". There are two possible interpretations, which we might expand like so:
1) That's fine, I would appreciate it.
2) That's fine, I can do it myself.
To your host, the second one is the more natural interpretation of the isolated "that's fine", but that intuition is certainly open to debate. Similarly, it seems to me that a falling intonation indicates (2), but again, introspection is not necessarily a reliable guide. A flat or rising intonation doesn't strike me as conveying (1) particularly strongly.
Pursuing my own intuitions further, it seems likely that if I wanted to say (1), I would actually say "that would be fine", and that this latter phrasing would never mean (2). But (1) is not an unreasonable interpretation of Mrs. SC's original utterance; had she said "that's fine with me", (1) would be clearly understood, and it's easy to imagine that she could have produced "that's fine" through ellipsis.
Of course, there's an easy way to avoid problems of ambiguity, whether one word is at issue, or the syntax of the entire sentence: just say something that disambiguates it. But if we all spent enough time trying to compute the potential interpretations of what we want to say before we say it, I'd be writing about the waiter who ran off in frustration rather than the ambiguity of words without explicit yes/no polarity.
This reminds me of the time I was at a party at a friend's house and was asked if I wanted another can of beer. I replied "kekkou desu," intending to mean "(No) I'm fine." Instead, I got another drink. (Though, I could chalk it up to the quirkiness of the host). Though Japanese "kekkou" and "ii" can be used for acceptance and rejection, I think that (like "fine"), the default interpretation in many cases is the negative.
Posted by: Russell | July 31, 2004 at 06:22 AM
We get a converse thing with answers to "Do you mind if I...?". The answer "Yes" usually means "Yes, please, go ahead", though acceptability of this might be dialectal. The answer is pragmatically likely to be polite agreement whether you say yes or no.
And then there's that old translational trap: "Voulez-vous some of this delicious double chocolate chip ice-cream?" -- "Merci," rubbing hands in anticipation. Whimper as it's taken away.
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