[Ads-l] Fwd: I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the dope

[Chris Waigl]

I heard that one too, and thought of this list.

From: Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 1:34 PM

Heard on the latest episode of the podcast "Criminal", which is a clip show
> celebrating 50 episodes.
> One clip had a woman talking about being in a unisex prison.


​A multi-sex prison, or, as she put it, a co-ed prison. (A term I've always
found odd outside the "ed" context.) ​


> Men bigly outnumbered the women, which worked out well for her because she
> was a drug addict and, as she said, "I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the
> dope." Context says that the intended meaning was "I'd be the girlfriend OF
> whoever had the dope," but the woman used some head inflection here,
> putting the possesive marker on "whoever". Composing the semantics of the
> original utterance by the usual rules, I get this as the (unintended)
> meaning: "For all situations Z such that there exists a unique person X
> such that there exists a person Y such that Y is the girlfriend of X and Y
> has the dope, Y = speaker."
>

​(Right. Or, more transparent to me, "I'd be any person such that this
person's girlfriend had the dope". Obviously not the intended meaning.)

the girlfriend of (whoever had the dope) --> ??? (whoever had the dope)'s
girlfriend -->  whoever's girlfriend had the dope.

This construction struck me as ​at the same time so clearly wrong, but also
right again: the person represented by the referent of "whoever" would
indeed be who she was the girlfriend of. So the possessive marker feels
oddly in the right place, even though it isn't.

-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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