THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN 2001
I was given this little speech as a joke at a young age: "Mardon me padam but you're seating in my sit. May I sew you to a sheet in the chack of the burch? It's not that I'm not sober, as many theople pink. I've just had tie many martoonis and have til sober to Tuesday off." Or something like that .
Spoonerisms are one form of speech error to which the historical Mr. Spooner was presumably especially prone, and some (but not all) of the errors in the"Mardon me padam" speech are of that type. When I was in grad school in psycholinguistics, we were encouraged to be observers of speech errors, noting as closely as possible what was said, what was intended, exactly when (if at all) the speaker stopped speaking to correct the error, the social situation, chemical influences on the speaker, etc. And the study of speech errors is one valid source of data for figuring out how language works in people's heads (more is probably inferred from the speech errors that people never make than the ones they do make). In linguistics there are little word-fragments called clitics, and attaching them to words is called cliticizing them. In one seminar I was in, guffaws were only imperfectly suppressed when the speaker referred to this as clitorizing.
Lots of jokes hinge on the ambiguity of language. In my line of work (machine translation from English to Japanese, and other language-related software) the analysis and resolution of these ambiguities is a big part of the job. So I can often analyze a joke in those terms. For instance, one example of poor translation from another language into English is the hotel sign: "Please take advantage of the chambermaid." It is not a syntactic ambiguity, but "take advantage of" as a phrase has both the general meaning of "make good use of" and the specialized meaning of roughly "get sex from an unwilling partner due to an imbalance of power". In general we use such phrases with multiple meanings all the time and think nothing of it because context tells us which one is right (compare "Make me a milkshake" to "Make me a star"), but there seems to be a special exception for off-color meanings, especially sexual ones. The writer of the hotel sign knew English well enough to make a perfect sentence; his or her failing was in not knowing an additional meaning -- which is why there is no substitute for a native speaker of the target language when a translation has to be correct. When I worked for Randall Forsberg (a woman known to people as Randy), she related how she had caused mirth by approaching a distinguished gentleman at a gathering in the UK and saying "Hi, I'm Randy. What's your name?", because in British English "randy" also means roughly "horny". Oh well, I ramble on.
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2 comments:
I'm inclined to think that, where linguistic ambiguity is concerned, off-color interpretations are merely a common instance of possibilities regarding any touchy and fascinating topic. Such a topic heightens awareness of ambiguities both existing and potential. Perhaps the epitome of this arises when someone is learning a language: linguistic ambiguities of any kind become more salient because language itself is getting a lot of attention. One of the pleasures of being around people learning a second language is the plethora of deliberate and inadvertent cross-lingual puns. It happens even when the language being learned is the person's first, though the awareness of the ambiguities is usually on the part of others: everyone has a collection of stories about ambiguous language from infantile speakers.
The notion of clitics is attractive but unclear to me. How, if at all, is a clitic different from an affix? Are there cultures in which being clitical should be approached with the same caution or hardihood as being critical?
Ambiguous language has an odd set of reputations in general. It expresses both richness and paucity of understanding remarkably well. Without it, as noted, much linguistic humor would be non-existent. William Empson laid it out as the very stuff of poetic meaning. Whole professions (being a lawyer comes to mind, as does technical writing) rely on it for their bread and butter. It can destroy all possibility of a situation coming to a successful conclusion; it can be the only way to attain such a conclusion. Legions of safety experts, managers, frustrated family members, and other all-too-human beings -- some even naive enough to believe it's possible to succeed -- engage in an endless battle to eradicate it. It is profoundly serviceable in maintaining accurate awareness, and in avoiding responsibility. I'm tempted to say that there's something very realistic about ambiguity.
I wonder: if the distinguished gentleman to whom Randy addressed her inadvertent miscommunication was a connoisseur of idiomatic differences between American and British English, perhaps he was tempted to reply with an offer to knock her up some morning.
I could go off into another extended series of comments on the matter of translation, especially since for about a year I've been engaged in helping my father with translation of some of his father's writings...but I think perhaps I should let that go just now (unless someone reading this actually wants that series!).
...Another direction (from which too I almost abstain for the moment) is the relationship among ambiguity, confusion, and contradiction, in connection with which I merely mention, for consideration in conjunction with the spooneristic speech at the beginning of this post, the remark, "I'm not so think as you drunk I am. I can still outsleep you in my think."
> I'm inclined to think that, where linguistic ambiguity is concerned,
> off-color interpretations are merely a common instance of possibilities
> regarding any touchy and fascinating topic.
I agree, but it's often hard to find anything quite as magnetic in this regard as sex.
> How, if at all, is a clitic different from an affix?
I confess I wasn't clear when I wrote my post about the difference between affixes and clitics, though Wikipedia on 'clitics' indicates there is a difference.
Machine translation reveals certain ambiguities that human beings just don't see. One of my favorites from the early days of our translation system was:
"Set the voucher number."
The interpretation was analogous to 'Set the thermostat lower.' The ambiguity is syntactic but is amply resolved at the level of semantics, since vouchers cannot be numb.
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