[Ads-l] weird "which"

[Laurence Horn]

This one is harder to deal with than other wicked “witch”es because of the garden path—the “which” seems at first to want to be an old-fashioned relative pronoun (cf. “which nine out of ten women said made their hair appear thicker...”) until that parsing eventually self-destructs.  Other cases don’t yield a similar garden path, or at least not such a prolonged one.  

LH

> On Jun 23, 2020, at 5:54 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Weird to me, anyway, especially in a pricey, presumably carefully edited TV
> commercial for a glamour hair product:
> 
> "Including a full-size leave-in elixir which nine out of ten women said
> their hair appeared thicker and fuller in just one week!"
> 
> JL
> 
> -- 
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org