Magic Spot Flowing

I think wine should always accompany weekend work. Loosens up the synapses, and makes one care less that one is not relaxing, because one is relaxed, anyway.

I enjoyed this interesting linguistic slipup:

“Pullum, however, doesn’t really take Gelernter’s argument seriously, presumably because it’s absurd and ignorant and doesn’t deserve to be.”

Parts of this entry, from Peter Seibel, were excerpted on Language Log itself, but they missed this fun little failure of parallelism, probably resulting from editing failure

Pullum doesn’t [take Gelernter’s argument seriously] because it doesn’t deserve to be [take _ seriously].

This works surprisingly well for a sentence whose elided portion is not identical to any earlier constituent. It reminds me of the LL series on cases where a pronoun is introduced that matches an earlier possessive phrase. We sort of fill in the necessary information.

I can’t resist:

Now consider again Skinner’s sentence:

Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale.

This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of situations in which justice has little to do with a disobedient whale. Equivalently, there are no situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale, in which justice doesn’t have little to do with a disobedient whale.

Earlier today I read one of the weekly emails from my VP and found myself thinking, there are some things that really don’t make a lot of sense without context and sound very strange and funny when presented alone. And I think justice not having anything to do with a disobedient whale is definitely one of them.