Semantic Compositions

Misinterpretation can be expensive if you're a genie

SC has lately become a fan of a reality TV show on NBC called Three Wishes. Whereas typical reality shows are focused on pushing people to do their worst (think Jackass, Fear Factor, or in a slightly different vein, American Idol), Three Wishes is an uplifting show where ordinary people with hard luck have their lives changed through the efforts of the show's crew. Examples of this have included the gift of a device that helps calm stuttering to a college student who dreamed of running for office, and helping a child with traumatic head injuries be able to play outside again. For the most part, the things they help out with are a matter of lacking money or influence, and by coming through with a decent production budget (and the generosity of various donors), there's a lot they can do to make people's lives better.

However, Friday night's episode featured a wish that might have been a costly mistake for the show's producers. It featured a high school student born with a leg condition that left him unable to play any sort of sports. In lieu of being an athlete, he had spent his high school years as the trainer for the school's football team. No operation or prosthetic could fix this one, but the team's players had approached the show's producers hoping that they could do something nice for him anyway.

Rather than just asking the student what he might wish for, cast member Diane Mizota took him out on the school's football field after a game, and had him whisper her his wish during a ceremony to honor his efforts. At this point in the show, the exact nature of the wish was not revealed to the viewer.

Later, it turned out that his wish had been:

I want to be an NFL trainer and do something special for my team.

The first half of this wish was fulfilled by arranging for him to spend next summer as an intern with the Cleveland Browns. But now, we finally get to the crucial linguistic problem.

There are two ways in which that sentence's referring expressions (aside from the "I", which we know is the student) might be interpreted (pay attention to the subscripts):

1) I want to be an [NFL (team)]_i trainer and do something special for [my team]_i.
2) I want to be an [NFL (team)]_i trainer and do something special for [my team]_j.

The first sentence expresses the idea that he wants to be an NFL trainer and do something special for the NFL team employing him, which presumably would be accomplished by acting in his capacity as trainer. The second sentence really expresses two wishes: that he wants to be an NFL trainer, and that he wants to do something for his high school team. The show's producers assumed that #2 was the case, and arranged for each member of the team to receive an LCD HDTV set from Dell. Whereas the first parse cost them no more than whatever the Browns might have charged for their participation, the second one added minimally $600 times whatever the number of players on the team was. Figuring on a 40-man roster, that's $24,000, and that assumes they were just monitor-sized, which did not look to be the case.

Truthfully, though, from watching this kid talk, there's no way he didn't mean #2. Your guess is as good as SC's about what else he might have meant by "do something special", but while TVs might not have an obvious connection to football ([we disagree -- the NFL, NCAA, and sports bar owners everywhere]), it was perfectly clear that his wish was being fulfilled for the right group of people. And just as clear that sometimes there really isn't any ambiguity where it would seem to be in language.

I knew I hated meetings

Everyone who has ever worked in an office has at least a passing acquaintance with motivational products like those produced by Successories. Their posters include pretty pictures with slogans like Rule #1: "If we don't take care of the customer...somebody else will."

Recently, your host became aware of a company with a much more Dilbert-like approach to the same business, Despair, Inc. Despair mocks the relentless rah-rah attitude of motivational speakers, and has a poster near and dear to SC's heart for reasons which should be readily apparent (remember that his employer is a consulting firm).

One of their posters is causing SC considerable cognitive dissonance, though. Captioned "Meetings", the slogan reads: "None of us is as dumb as all of us." The problem with this two-quantifier sentence is that while only one reading is meaningful, your host cannot get himself to stop thinking about the other one.

The intended reading might be paraphrased as "while any single person in this organization might be pretty dumb, they are less dumb than the group as a whole". Makes sense in a too-many-cooks-spoil-the-broth sort of way. But the other meaning, which SC knows doesn't really work with the quantifier none, runs something like "the absence of all employees is equally as dumb as the collection of all employees". If you replace that none with an expression that actually refers to someone, like "A few of us are as dumb as all of us", both readings are intelligible -- although of course the line loses considerably in the wittiness department.

If contemplating the nonsensical meaning of that "none of us" line bothers you as much as it does SC, you can always take refuge in the knowledge that there are worse things to worry about .

30 days hath a 2% CD

A long time ago, your host wrote about a woman he saw in a grocery store, who could say with a straight face "I only have 15 items" in her cart, when such was plainly false. Although he'd never met her before, and hasn't seen her since, he's pretty sure he's selling Chez SC to her sister, or maybe a cousin.

Let's clear up a legal point first. If you are a legal adult (the technical term is that you have reached the "age of majority"), and have not been declared incompetent by a court, then if you sign your name to a contract, it means you agree to the contract. In the case of a real estate transaction, you don't just sign -- you initial, and initial, and initial, and sign, and sign some more. If this seems a little overly emphatic, all will become clear momentarily.

In the case at hand, the buyer signed a contract with a 30-day escrow period (mathematically inclined readers may do the arithmetic with Friday as the 30th day). This means that she is obligated to have the sum total of the purchase price deposited in escrow by the 30th day, and not, say, the day after. We never met the woman to hold a gun to her head or otherwise coerce her, and she contacted our realtor 3 days before making her offer and having it accepted. So all in all, she will have been involved in this transaction for 33 days at the time of closing.

All this emphasis on 30 days ought to be raising a red flag by now for most readers. So here's the payoff. 10 days ago, SC received a call from his realtor, where she relayed 2 propositions with contradictory content. Somehow, she managed to miss that last issue. The propositions:

1) Before she knew she would be entering into a contract to purchase Chez SC, the buyer placed her down payment funds into a 30-day CD,
2) Said CD supposedly would not expire until the day after escrow was set to close.

So would we mind extending the close of escrow until the next business day, after Labor Day?

Most readers will have read those statements and performed a bit of temporal reasoning like so:

If t1 < t2, then (t1 + 30) < (t2 + 30). However, we have been told that in fact (t1 + 30) >= (t2 + 30). So since buyer says the consequent is false, but that the antecedent is true, then courtesy of the truth table for material implication, we know that the buyer's claim is that the whole implication is false. Unfortunately for the buyer, we assume an axiomization of arithmetic that says that the statement is true, which only leaves us the line in the table that says the antecedent is false, and therefore we must conclude that the buyer is full of it.

What, you didn't think about your preferred axiomization of arithmetic?

In any event, recognizing that the buyer was attempting to have a situation where she collected more interest and got SC and wife to pay for the privilege of enabling her to do so (courtesy of three days of prorated interest, association dues, and property taxes), your host responded by offering to allow the buyer to extend her escrow period, so long as she paid all costs associated with a later closing. Needless to say, she was angry.

We then received a call from our realtor a day later, informing us that by a miracle, the buyer had managed to convince her bank (which happens to be the same one that SC uses) to "let her out early" without any penalties, and by prorating the interest on the CD to account for a shorter period. Unfortunately, that's also not true, because banks can't let you out of CDs early, by law, without a penalty. Perhaps the truth is that she was hoping to roll her money into a shorter CD that nevertheless would have delayed the close, and backed out of that when it became obvious that we would not pay her for the privilege.

While your host started this blog 20 months ago hoping to demonstrate the use of "ideas...out of theoretical and applied linguistics", it really doesn't take a linguist, a philosopher or a mathematician to see through baloney like this. But it never ceases to amaze him to see how many people haven't figured that out for themselves.

Oh, yes he is

SC's parents passed along a copy of the schedule for the upcoming season of a local playhouse, the Poway Center for the Performing Arts. Turns out that a production has a title of the sort that makes for SC posting material.

In a few months, they'll be putting on a stage adaptation of a book by children's author Judith Viorst, commissioned originally by the Kennedy Center. The book/production's title, "Alexander, Who’s Not Not Not Not Not Not Going to Move", has a semantic interpretation which is quite at odds with its pragmatic interpretation.

From the pragmatic standpoint, the repetition of "not" makes it particularly emphatic. SC isn't aware of a scale of child peevishness, but it probably would look something like so:

Mild: I'm not going to move.
Moderate: I am not not not going to move.
Serious: I am not not not not not  going to move.
Severe: Mooooooooooooooooooom!

Repetition certainly does serve as an intensifier. But from the semantic standpoint? Well, your host counts six "nots". Which means they all cancel out, assuming they take the same scope. Which means that the play might equally well be titled, "Alexander, Who Is Going to Move". Which, incidentally, is what he ends up doing anyway.

An SC No-Prize goes to the first reader who comes up with a screwball analysis that renders the six "noes" as a semantic negative.

Trivially true

ESPN has a blurb up for this week's baseball "power rankings" (a subjective evaluation of the teams in MLB):

For the first time in more than 30 years, Washington is on top of our baseball power rankings.

It's true -- but although the intended reading is that there hasn't been baseball in Washington, D.C. in all that time, the truth conditions of the sentence are nevertheless pretty vacuously satisfied. Until late 1994, there was no ESPN.com (and then it was called ESPNet.sportszone.com), and the power rankings didn't follow for another 5 years after that. So the suggestion that something about their rankings hadn't changed in 30 years is no different from saying that it hadn't changed for 10,000 years, or since the beginning of the universe.

This does allow for some amusing consequences, though. Despite the Yankees having been on top for much of the time since the rankings began, one can minimize their pre-2005 dominance with statements like, "The Yankees have only led the ESPN power rankings for 200 weeks in the last 15 centuries". This makes SC feel better, even if 14.9 of those centuries are frankly irrelevant.

Save at least pi, or maybe e percent

Your host just picked up his mail for the day, and inside was a most unusual offer from an insurance company. Emblazoned on the envelope, and repeated several times in the text of the enclosed letter, was the phrase:

save up to $327.96 or more

It's an odd statement for at least two reasons, although thankfully it's not false in an offensive way, like bogus past due notices:

1) Your host interprets "up to X" as meaning that the dollar amount in question is an upper bound. A charitable interpretation might be that "or more" merely cancels the upper bound. After all, it might be that the company's risk pool could tolerate the addition of a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti, and so they might be able to knock $5,000 off the premiums of such a car's owner. A more cynical ([read: likely -- ed.]) interpretation might be that they want to render the entire statement false, knowing that many (most?) of their offers will be far less attractive.

2) $327.96? That's a very random number for an advertisement. One wonders if it isn't the largest amount they've ever saved someone, based merely on the bizarre choice of digits. One rarely sees signs saying things like "This weekend only -- $43.71 off any purchase of $268.44!". It's usually more like "$50 off any purchase of $300!" or something else with nice round numbers. In puzzling over the communicative intent here, SC can't decide if it's actually a real example, or somebody's weird idea that such a specific number will be attention-grabbing ([it ain't that weird; you read the letter, didn't you? -- ed.]).

It depends on the meaning of "balloons"

In a sort of "now it can be told" moment, the first bit of formal semantics to pop up on these pages in some time.

Last week, your host was engaged in making preparations for the celebration of Mrs. SC's medical school graduation. Reservations for the restaurant had been made a month in advance, but for reasons unkown, the proprietors prefer not to associate with a florist. Therefore, it fell to your host to oversee the acquisition of flowers for the table. Wishing to preserve the maximum possible element of surprise, none of these plans were disclosed to Mrs. SC before the dinner.

However, as Mrs. SC prefers her celebrations quiet, she wanted the environment to be as balloon-free as possible. Since she also has an astonishingly good handle on your host's modus operandi, days before the actual event, she confronted him with the question:

You're not ordering balloons, are you?

Now, here are the facts of the matter. In order to fill the table with flowers, your host ordered several identical bouquets. But in order to distinguish one as particularly a gift for Mrs. SC, he ordered an additional bouquet which was both larger than the others, and decorated with a single balloon. Therefore, he felt confident replying:

No, I'm not ordering balloons.

while knowing full well that he had in fact ordered balloon.

So here is the question. Granting that the most probable interpretation of Mrs. SC's question is a demand to know whether the following logical formula is true (omitting details about time):

    AxAy( (x = SC) & Order(x,y) & (y = balloons) )

was it dishonest of your host to further parse out the plural morpheme and rewrite the formula as:

    AxAy( (x = SC) & Order(x,y) & (y = balloon) & (Cardinality(y) >= 2) )

I say no. The balloon said "Congratulations".

 

Cooperation is a two-way process

SC has been very impressed with some recent comments on an old favorite post, The Totemic Power of Names.A high-school student named Sara, presently employed at Dairy Queen, has been ably making the case that customers who actually get what they ask for sometimes get very upset over this fact. Cashiers aren't mind-readers, and if they have to throw away product because the customer doesn't want to be held accountable, it's them -- not the customer -- who will have to answer to the insidious Darth Manager.

This is a fair point, and so it's time to take another look at the situation, using an old favorite analytical tool, Grice's maxims. Two of the four strike your host as relevant:

First, the maxim of quantity, which says:

1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary.

Second, the maxim of manner, which adds:

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.

In the original post, there were a couple of assumptions which were unstated, but not necessarily valid. First, there was an assumption that cashiers wouldn't try to comply with the literal text of a customer's request if it meant making something off-menu. Second, there was an assumption that customers would think along such lines themselves, and omit only words which seemed gratuitously unnecessary to deciphering which of the possible menu items could actually be meant (like the "love" in "Choco-Cherry Love Blizzard").

But these aren't justified assumptions. Under the maxim of quantity, your host assumed that "chocolate-cherry blizzard" was adequately informative to uniquely specify an item on the menu, and that the full statement of "chocolate-covered cherry" was therefore unnecessary, on the grounds that the first was informative enough and the second was excessive. Sara points out that two different recipes are involved here, and only the latter is actually on the menu. At first, SC objected to this on the grounds that he's never seen the other one, and might have added that even if the "Choco-Cherry Love Blizzard" involved the other recipe, he's never seen them both on the menu together to create a potentially ambiguous group of menu items. However, from the cashier's perspective, "chocolate-cherry" isn't informative enough for them to be sure that the customer means that they will be happy with getting the item on the menu, as-is. Perhaps a special order is really what's meant, and so what appears to be informative enough from the customer side isn't actually so from the cashier's.

This brings us to the other issue, the question of manner. Again, the omission of words like "covered" and "love" appears to a customer who actually expects to get what's on the menu to satisfy the condition of being brief, without creating undue ambiguity or obscurity. However, a cashier can't count on the rationality of customers -- while some customers might expect that a brief expression will simply be assimilated to the nearest matching pattern, others will expect to get something different. Thus, Sara brings up the example of a customer who orders a "strawberry Blizzard" when they really want a "strawberry cheesecake Blizzard" (if we really want to be pedantic about it, DQ calls it a "strawberry cheeseQUake Blizzard"). From SC's perspective as a customer, if the only Blizzard on the menu with a name including the word "strawberry" is the one which also includes "cheesecake", then he would have expected the cashier to understand that that's what he wanted. After all, that's what's on the menu. But from the cashier's perspective, assuming that customers are reasonable enough to understand the distinction between what's on the menu and what they said isn't at all safe. After all, it's what they said -- wasn't the cashier listening?

None of this is meant to say that cashiers who really don't speak English should be able to get away with blaming customers for their own failures to understand (except, of course, in non-English-speaking countries). And SC isn't backing down at all from the claim that reciting long strings of marketing-speak is gratuitous and unnecessary. But that shouldn't prevent us from having a little empathy for people who know from painful experience that not everyone says what they mean.

It depends on the meaning of "lot"

A few minutes ago on the phone with a friend, currently a resident at a prestigious Texas hospital:

I'm getting three to four hours of sleep a night. That's a lot.

Mrs. SC:

No, it's not. Residents at my school get more.

One can easily imagine constructing a scale for "lot" as a modifier for "sleep". For most of us, "a lot" of sleep is probably 7-8 hours a night, "enough" maybe being 6-7, "not much" as 4-5, etc. This is a good reminder that meaning can be context dependent -- when Mrs. SC says that her colleagues get "more" sleep, your host feels comfortable guessing that it's in the range of 0.5 - 1 hour more. Just thinking about getting that little sleep is making SC tired.

One sore loser, coming up!

While browsing ESPN's preseason NBA coverage ([don't you have something more important to do, like getting the new site ready? -- ed.]), your host saw a very difficult to interpret sentence. At least, it better be tougher than it looks like, or this guy really is nuts.

Orlando Magic GM John Weisbrod has been widely criticized for being a hockey manager out of his league -- literally -- in trying to assemble a basketball team. In this ESPN article, he comments on his philosophy:

Our objective was not to bring in a single player that wasn't a sore loser.

The double negative makes this a bit tough to unpack; let's try cancelling them out:

Our objective was to bring in a player/players that are sore losers.

Whoa there! Does he actually mean he wants a team full of headcases? Just a few sentences later, he's quoted as saying:

The NBA has been in the business of prima donna development as a league and I wanted to get out of that.

This leads SC to think that Weisbrod was trying to say that he wanted a team full of players who wouldn't tolerate losing, not that he wanted a team filled with people named Keyshawn, Terrell, and Latrell. But as far smarter linguists have written, negation is just plain hard.