Ambiguity, eh?

Early this summer, I received an email containing the invitation below:

INVITATION TO EVENT:

A DISCUSSION OF THE JOY OF SEX WITH DR FIONA BOULDER

Checkland E513, Wednesday 27 July, 17.00-19.00

I contacted the organisers suggesting they might have worded the title of the session slightly differently, but it was too late. The mail had already gone out to over 7000 Brighton University staff.

I have no idea how the evening went.

Ambiguity is the word linguists (and non-linguists) use to describe this kind of phenomenon. It’s all around us. Pretty much every utterance you hear will have more than one possible meaning, and often it’s the presence of an ambiguous word or an ambiguous structure that is responsible. Here are a few of my favourite ambiguous newspaper headlines. Can you get the different possible meanings?

  • Stolen painting found by tree.
  • Police found drunk in shop window.
  • The explosion was attributed to a build up of gas by one town official.

I had no intentions of blogging about ambiguity today (in fact, I had no intention of blogging about anything), but when I picked up my youngest daughter from school, she said something that interested me. She’s just started school. Literally, just three weeks ago. She has a good friend, Juliet, with whom she shares a birthday. They’ve bonded and have become inseparable. This is what Luna said:

  • Juliet and me don’t like the same things.

I was surprised. Luna and Juliet are so, so close. I would have presumed that they would spend a lot of time talking about all the things they have in common, rather than the things they don’t. She then continued:

  • We don’t like cabbage. We don’t like tomatoes. We don’t like broccoli…

Ambiguity, eh?

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