Your host is presently in New Orleans (more on that shortly), but that doesn't actually explain his absence for the last week; he's simply been running low on ideas again. However, travel usually helps refill the tank, and this time is no exception. So here goes:
Gambling is legal in New Orleans, albeit apparently only in certain areas zoned for it, and so there are billboards all over the city advertising the local outposts of the Bally's and Harrah's chains. The ads for Bally's in particular have been causing SC's brain no end of syntactic distress, as they are all based around a slogan of highly questionable grammaticality (always in all-caps): "ALL SLOTS CHANGED!".
To get the semantics out of the way, further explanatory information on a number of the billboards indicates that the intended meaning is "all of our slot machines have been altered to produce payout odds more favorable to the player". (For example, some billboards include the added slogan "All slots, all loose, all the time".) But your host can't get that meaning out of the phrase as it stands. It would be better with an auxiliary, as in "All slots are changed!", or even better with a perfective, as in "All slots have been changed!". As the phrase stands, the only interpretation that SC can recover from the raw "ALL SLOTS CHANGED!" is along the lines of "all of our slot machines have been physically removed and replaced with different units".
Mrs. SC argues that it's not as categorically bad as SC claims. Syntactically, she sees no difference between it and, say, "My mind changed", for which we can construct some valid contexts (A: "What's different?" B: "My mind changed."). Perhaps so, but even in those contexts, your host would expect to hear something more like "I've changed my mind".
On taxi cabs, the phrase gets embedded in a larger noun phrase which makes it marginally more acceptable to SC: "Tell the driver, 'Take me to the place with ALL SLOTS CHANGED!". It would still sound better to your host as "Take to the place where all the slots have been changed!", but it's an improvement.
I'm with you.
In "my mind changed", you have something that has the ability to actually change itself. The slots cannot spontaneously change... someone must change them.
ALL SLOTS CHANGED, to me, means that the slots have somehow morphed into something else on their own: ALL SLOTS CHANGED INTO WHITE TIGERS, perhaps.
Posted by: eric morse | May 13, 2005 at 10:42 AM
It makes sense if you read it like a newspaper headline.
Posted by: chris | May 15, 2005 at 07:22 AM
As a citizen of New Orleans, I'm bombarded with that advertisement daily. At first I thought it rather clever ("teehee! 'Changed!' You'll get more money!") despite its odd construction, but the more I see it, the more it makes me cringe. It's nice to see that I'm not the only one. ;)
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