Interesting phrasing

[Ronald Butters]

"Too tolerant?" Nonsense. If I say, "It sure is cold in here" and my butler turns up the heat, is bmy butler being too tolerant of the indirectness of speech act?

It does not take any imagination whatever to understand that what he intended to CONVEY was "We are in the middle of dealing with the after-effects of an earthquake that just a few minutes ago disrupted service." But I suppose if he had said that, someone would have complained that he was verbose.

I am reminded of Swift's philosophers who thought language too imprecise, so they carried around objects to show to each other. I forget what they did about verbs.

What;s next on ADS-L, sunbeams out of cucumbers?


On Aug 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> You're too tolerant.
> 
> "In the middle of an earthquake," when the quake is over, implies that
> there's so much act-of-God chaos at Verizon HQ that *of course* they haven't
> fixed it.
> 
> BTW, the news claims (truthfully, I suppose) that the quake was "felt" in 22
> states and Canada.
> 
> Felt by what super-sensitive devices?  I'm in an adjoining state and neither
> I nor anybody I've asked felt or noticed anything at all.
> 
> JL
> 
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:29 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Interesting phrasing
>> 
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> A comment on the cell phone outage in parts of the country today:
>> 
>>> When asked why the phone lines weren't working Tuesday afternoon,
>>> Richard Young, a Verizon spokesman simply responded: "We're in the
>>> middle of an earthquake right now, so it's not surprising."
>> 
>> Well, that's fine, except that "we"--including Verizon--were not "in the
>> middle of an earthquake" when the comment was made. The earthquake had
>> long passed by then. I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong
>> with the comment--in fact, it seems to be fairly typical shorthand for
>> the "extended event".
>> 
>> Take it or leave it...
>> 
>> VS-)
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> 
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