Lunch at Antoine's

SC went for lunch at Antoine's yesterday, one of the most historic restaurants in New Orleans. Yes, pedants, your host is well aware that the novel was Dinner at Antoine's, not lunch, and that it inspired the competing slogan of Breakfast at Brennan's (also an excellent meal, but do not make the mistake of relying on their Internet forms to secure a reservation). Nevertheless, while at Antoine's, two items of minor, but sincere, linguistic interest took place:

• First, there was a disclaimer on the menu which your host found delightfully ambiguous (although also very weaselly). Seemingly innocuous, it states:

  To Our Guests

  To cook well requires a certain amount of time. If you must wait it is only to serve you better and please you more.

  Note carefully the separation of the propositions "to cook well..." and "if you must wait...". The charitable surface interpretation is easy enough to come by -- we cook slowly, things aren't all premade, etc. But the sinister (and therefore more probable, at least in your host's mind) interpretation is "If you find yourself sitting around waiting, don't complain. We're not terribly interested. This has nothing to do with cooking." When one finds oneself in a room with 50 tables, only six of them full, and yet cannot get a second glass of iced tea, events tend to favor the latter interpretation. That said, the food was excellent, the second (and third!) glass of iced tea arrived before the end of the meal, and if you've got the time, SC highly recommends the place.

• Despite the relative emptiness of the room, a table next to SC's featured guests having a most extraordinary conversation. Not because they were essentially interesting people, but because an event which your host had previously judged impossible was raised to mere high improbability. That is to say, for the first time since SC took up the study of linguistics in 1996, he actually heard a term of art ("X-bar theory") used in a conversation among strangers -- and not in the environment of a conference.

  There are a couple of ways of looking at this. We might say that this allows us to finally calculate the probability of hearing the phrase "X-bar theory" in a random conversation, without using any estimating techniques for previously unseen words -- but SC has no idea how many words he's heard in his lifetime, and can only speculate that the number is now 1 over something so large that the resulting probability can only be expressed with the aid of a computer that deals in 128-bit floating point numbers. Or we might say that this allows us to estimate in a very crude way the time from introduction of an linguistic term of art to its uptake in general usage -- a mere 28 years from Jackendoff 1977. Or it might simply be the case that your host is a hopeless geek starving for a little validation.

  That said, SC is now taking bets ([not really, folks; do not send cash -- ed.]) on the over-under for how long it will be before the second such event takes place. Using historical precedent, and dating from when he acquired the term himself, he'll set the line at nine years. Any bets on the word?

Comments

[Gopher Punk]

SC,

I really don't think it's a good idea for you to make bets. Except for the time that you freakishly predicted that the Chargers would reach the SuperBowl. Hell probably froze over briefly at that point ;) I have given up betting for your own good, but if I had to bet I would bet the under.

Gopher "I have never lost a bet to SC" Punk

[Semantic Compositions]

He's not lying, folks, but that "I have never lost a bet to SC" line is vacuously true -- the chicken has never had the nerve to lay it on the line.

Also, this punk knows perfectly well that the bet on the Chargers to make the Super Bowl in the '94-'95 season was with someone else.