The nanosecond of uncertainty

A couple of years ago, Neal Whitman and Mark Liberman scrutinized a claim by James J. Kilpatrick. From Mark’s summary, here:

James Kilpatrick complained in print about the “horrid” headline “Mass Transit Not An Option for All Drivers”, on the grounds that “if mass transit is not an option for ‘all’ drivers, it cannot be an option for even one driver”. He added, “Even a little ambiguity is a dangerous thing. The problem with this Horrid Example is that it creates a nanosecond of uncertainty.”

Neal Whitman and I ignored the “nanosecond of uncertainty” business, since a literal application of this idea would put pretty much all of the English language off limits.

Mark and Neal focused instead on Kilpatrick’s treatment of negation and quantification (and Jan Freeman joined in with a discussion of another example from this point of view). Here I’m going to go a bit further with the “nanosecond of uncertainty” matter and the dangers of “even a little ambiguity”.

Plant gases

At first I was puzzled by the lead headline in the October 1 NYT:

E.P.A. PROPOSES
NEW REGULATIONS
ON PLANT GASES

Plant gases? Like exudations from onions? Or the fragrance of lilacs?

No, not plants the living organisms, but “power plants and large industrial facilities” (as the article puts it). I’m not entirely sure why the ‘living plant’ sense of plant gas is so much easier for me to retrieve than the ‘industrial plant’ sense, but there it is.

It might be a mistake to bring up ambiguous or hard-to-interpret headlines here, since the mention of one usually results in a cascade of further examples, including many old favorites (as in the recent “crash blossoms” thread in Language Log).

Up by X to Y

A box on the front page of the New York Times on 30 May:

To Our Readers

On June 1, the Monday-Saturday newsstand price of The Times will increase from $1.50 to $2.00. The Sunday newsstand price will increase from $5.00 to $6.00. Home delivery prices will go up by $.70 to $1.54 per week, depending upon the days of delivery.

(my emphasis). When I got to the boldfaced bit, I was at first startled to read that apparently a current home delivery price of $.84 per week (certainly not what I’m paying) will increase to $1.54 per week (still a bargain), but then “depending upon the days of delivery” made it clear that the reading I’d gotten for the boldfaced bit was not the one the Times intended — though both readings are possible for the boldfaced bit out of context.

What set me up for the misreading was the prior context, where the price changes were of the form increase from OLD to NEW, so I read the third price change as similarly focused on the new price, that is, as go up by CHANGE-AMOUNT to NEW, but in fact the intended reading of by … to was not this one, but one expressing a range of change amounts, that is as go up by CHANGE-AMOUNT-1 to CHANGE-AMOUNT-2.

The intended reading could be brought out by marking CHANGE-AMOUNT-1 with from:

go up by from $.70 to $1.54 per week.

I suppose there are people who find the sequence by from ugly and wordy, but googling on {“increase by from”} nets a fair number of relevant (and unambiguous) examples, for instance:

The global population is projected to increase by from two to three billion to around nine billion. (link)

(I’ve switched from go up from to increase to reduce the number of irrelevant hits.) In case it’s the other reading you want, a comma will make things clear:

go up by $.70, to $1.54 per week.

But otherwise, you have to rely on background information and real-world plausibility to choose the appropriate reading — which is just what I did.

The imparseable dream

Mark Mandel posted to ADS-L yesterday (under the heading “the imparseable dream”) with this baffling headline:

Advocate happy credit-card companies called on the White House carpet

(from the Philadelphia Inquirer of 26 April). Contemplate this for a while, and then I’ll reveal the interpretation “under the fold”.