zompist bboard

Sunday I watched a four-hour mashup of the plays of Aristophanes. Each section ended with a moral and the moral for the second section (which incorporated The Knights) was "Never trust someone with sausages." I actually sought out the actress at intermission to ask her, "Does this mean that if someone has sausages, you shouldn't trust them or that you shouldn't give someone sausages and trust them with them?" and she replied "Both".

In summary, sausages ruin relationships.

Sounds like they mashed in some of Juno and the Paycock along the way...

linguoboy wrote:In summary, sausages ruin relationships.

For some reason I read this in a NSFW fashion.

Travis B. wrote:

linguoboy wrote:In summary, sausages ruin relationships.

For some reason I read this in a NSFW fashion.

For a relatively clear reason, I was tempted to reply, "Not MY sausage!" but this forum doesn't really have the appropriate smiley to go along with it, and it felt like a pretty corny joke anyway.

FIGHT ON FLIGHT: MAN SPITS BLOOD, PUNCHES FLY, DEATH THREATS OVER BEER

Yeah, he was a little over the top, but that fly really had it coming.

(headline from Drudgereport)

Soap wrote:FIGHT ON FLIGHT: MAN SPITS BLOOD, PUNCHES FLY, DEATH THREATS OVER BEER

Yeah, he was a little over the top, but that fly really had it coming.

Damn, what was that person doing that was so bad he punched 'em in the fly?! Also, I didn't know Death took beer so seriously!

The BBC's "most read" list today has not one but two beauties.

This one genuinely had me perplexed at first:
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams continue planning battle

This one only briefly mislead me but is worth mentioning:
Aberdeen sanitary product pilot to start across Scotland

Salmoneus wrote:Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams continue planning battle

This was very perplexing for me, but mostly because I misread Robbie as Robin and thought to myself that he's not really up for battling anyone

I have my guesses as to what both of those headlines mean, but I'm not sure whether they're right.

EDIT:

Libya's Street Racers & Revenge Porn: VICE News Tonight Full Episode (HBO)
Spoiler:

Salmoneus wrote:Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams continue planning battle

I'm not sure where the garden path is. This is about JP (from LZ) and RW, who apparently were in the past, and are still, planning a battle?

Aberdeen sanitary product pilot to start across Scotland

Also not sure how this could go wrong?


JAL

jal wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams continue planning battle

I'm not sure where the garden path is. This is about JP (from LZ) and RW, who apparently were in the past, and are still, planning a battle?

There. That's where the garden path is.
Spoiler: they are not, and have not been, planning a battle.

Aberdeen sanitary product pilot to start across Scotland

Also not sure how this could go wrong?

That secondary meaning of 'pilot' didn't immediately occur to me. I used the normal sense of 'pilot'. As a result, I read "start across" in its phrasal verb sense.

So, I thought that a pilot - possibly associated with an Aberdeen-based sanitary product, or else just a pilot of products, from aberdeen, who was very sanitary - had begun their journey from one side of Scotland to another. And I only drew back from that because I was wondering 'wait, what's a product pilot? Or... ok then why is this pilot associated with an aberdeen sanitary product? Did she do something controversial with it? Or are they sponsoring her? Or...?'

And frankly, even after working it out, I don't really know what's going on. For one thing: if the pilot is across scotland, what makes it an Aberdeen pilot? Or is it an Aberdeen product? And although it ends up meaning the same either way, I still don't know if the writer was intending [sanitary product] + [pilot] or [sanitary] [product pilot].

I assume that the pilot occurred in Aberdeen, and now is rolling out across all of Scotland.

[sanitary] [product pilot] doesn't even make any sense, so it's obviously [sanitary product] [pilot]

Aberdeen sanitary product pilot to start across Scotland

Also not sure how this could go wrong?

I agree, this one's pretty obvious to me.

Some people here clearly have never heard of ....

Huh, the ambiguity between [sanitary product] and [sanitary] [product] completely escaped me. "Sanitary products" is a polite euphemism for pads and tampons, Sal.

KathTheDragon wrote:[sanitary] [product pilot] doesn't even make any sense, so it's obviously [sanitary product] [pilot]

A product pilot is where a product is piloted. If it's being done for sanitary reasons, then it's a [sanitary] [product pilot] - in the same way as it might be an IT product pilot or a security product pilot or an educational product pilot. [it could also be a pilot that is sanitary, which is semantically feasible in some contexts but clearly unlikely].

As I say, though, that doesn't really matter, since a product pilot for sanitary reasons is very similar to a pilot of a sanitary product. Although then again, given that 'sanitary product' is more specific than 'product relating to sanitation', there could be a difference sometimes. For instance, if they were piloting a product that automatically cleaned toilets, that would be a sanitary [product pilot], but not a [sanitary product] pilot in the normal sense.


Alynnidar: that could be, yes. My original guess was that it was a product developed in Abderdeen (aberdeen product rather than aberdeen pilot), because that's the sort of story where the news might bother to mention the location (a local industry good news story), but you're probably right.


EDIT: yes, it seems you're right. Although the next line of the story is also a little delight: A project to provide free sanitary products to women from low income households in Aberdeen is to be rolled out across the country. But why do people across the country want to provide free products to women in Aberdeen, we might ask?

...oh for fuck's sake, can't at least one thread be free of this bullshit?


The thread title is not "I don't understand these words please explain them to me oh great one, because I'm a fucking moron." It's a thread about syntactic ambiguities and confusing sentence structures, not a thread for patronisingly explaining jokes back to the people who made them. Yes I have heard of sanitary products, because I'm not fucking six; but that does not eliminate the parsing ambiguities.


If you seriously can't see anything ambiguous in that sentence then stop acting so superior, because it's you who're missing something. For example, replace "Aberdeen sanitary products" with "aeroplane" or "Dutch". Would "Aeroplane pilot starts across Scotland" or "Dutch pilot starts across Scotland" have the same default interpretation? No. Which means that the 'correct' interpretation of the headline is being driven by the semantics, not by the syntax, which is indeed ambiguous.

Salmoneus wrote:There. That's where the garden path is. Spoiler: they are not, and have not been, planning a battle.

Thanks, fooled with eyes open :).

And frankly, even after working it out, I don't really know what's going on.

I also assumed alynnidalar's explanation, but it's a mess semantically, I agree (just like that 2nd sentence).


JAL

I guess the pilot joke just flew over everybody's heads. Oh well, i shouldve known better. Tampon jokes just arent funny, period.

jal wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:There. That's where the garden path is. Spoiler: they are not, and have not been, planning a battle.

Thanks, fooled with eyes open .

Me, too. (Now I'm not sure I know what it means ).

I interpreted the second one to mean: there's a sanitary product from Aberdeen (I didn't even bother parsing "sanitary product"), but the manufacturers are about to release it throughout Scotland. Or something like that.

Salmoneus wrote:If you seriously can't see anything ambiguous in that sentence then stop acting so superior, because it's you who're missing something.

Of course I can see ambiguity there, but when you actually say the words "I still don't know if the writer was intending [sanitary product] + [pilot] or [sanitary] [product pilot]" as if it's so ambiguous you can't tell which is the intended wording, it does leave one wondering. The two readings certainly don't seem equally probable, because [sanitary product] is such a common phrase (and so much more frequently encountered than [sanitary] [product], at least for those of us who shop in that aisle) that it immediately seems more likely.

Which once again shows the superior orthography of German and Dutch, that clearly distinguish noun compounds from adjective + noun :).


JAL

alynnidalar wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:If you seriously can't see anything ambiguous in that sentence then stop acting so superior, because it's you who're missing something.

Of course I can see ambiguity there, but when you actually say the words "I still don't know if the writer was intending [sanitary product] + [pilot] or [sanitary] [product pilot]" as if it's so ambiguous you can't tell which is the intended wording, it does leave one wondering. The two readings certainly don't seem equally probable, because [sanitary product] is such a common phrase (and so much more frequently encountered than [sanitary] [product], at least for those of us who shop in that aisle) that it immediately seems more likely.

This. It may be structurally ambiguous, but the semantics immediately clarifies the intended meaning.

But the semantics are the same. In both cases you're talking about the same products being trialed for the same reasons. Semantics cannot clarify which of two structures is intended when the meaning is the same.

It's like saying that semantics can clarify whether "pink rose colour" means [pink rose] [colour] or [pink] [rose colour]. Both mean the same thing! There is indeed likely no fact of the matter which structure was 'intended' in a particular case (except where emphasis makes it clear).

But whatever the fuck. Clearly this has gone beyond discussion of either syntax or semantic; I don't know why it's so desparately important to fight me word-by-word over this, but I have better things to spend my mental health on.

The semantics clearly are not the same. A [sanitary] [product pilot] is a product pilot that is sanitary, whatever that means. A [sanitary product] [pilot] is a pilot for sanitary products, aka tampons and pads. Since only the second one actually means anything to me, it's the only reasonable choice.

I really don't know how you're seeing this all as us insisting on fighting with you - we're just trying to explain why this headline doesn't pose any problems to us in the face of you insisting that it's indisputably problematic.