Sacrificing factual fidelity for flow

[Benjamin Barrett]

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> I'm with Dave.  Extralinguistic knowledge makes the confusion you perceive to be a remote possibility for 21st Century humans.  Thus, there is an excellent likelihood that "Benjamin Barrett" is a 21st Century translation program rather than a carbon-based life form.
>
>   I don't agree that your paraphrase is the "strict" meaning of the sentence. "Strictly," the sentence is ambiguous, but its ambiguity seems to me to be of the "gotcha" kind whereby the "common-sense" meaning is shown to be wrong and a remotely possible meaning is revealed as correct. Gotcha!
>
I have trouble believing this is ambiguous even given your awareness
caveat below. It seems nothing short of being dishonest to claim that
"the first synthesizer became commercially available in 1964".
(Hyperbole does not seem remotely possible here because NESsies would
not interpret this as such.)
>   The message in the "crawl" could conceivably mean what you thought it meant, but if it did I think the writer would have used different words, e.g.:  "In 1964, a consumer bought the very first synthesizer made."  Even that is remotely ambiguous in the opposite direction but again only in a "gotcha" sense.  One [i.e., "I"] would also expect another sentence or so elaborating on this unusual occurrence, e.g. "Inventor Gyro Gearloose said he was sick of listening to it."
>
>   The putative confusion is forestalled partly because one's awareness of metonymy in cases involving manufactured items should suggest that it was synthesizers of the first commercial model that went on sale in 1964, rather than the unique first device created; and partly by one's knowledge that the very first device created is most unlikely to have gone straight to a consumer.  Technology doesn't advance like that.
>
Thank you for the feedback. Here you are saying that semantic/pragmatics
override the syntax. I think, however, that this sort of construction is
so common in English that knowledge of the real world need not even be
invoked. You have presented an excellent problem with my example,
though, so I will gather other cases and try presenting them.

(I have seen this sort of thing in real estate documents as well as
other legal contexts. In my recent house purchase, I had to ask my agent
about an item, and he just told me that the common practice reading was
X and so I was okay.)
>   My guess is that your initial misinterpretation exemplified a dread "senior moment" (called a "brainfart" in younger patients).
>
FWIW, I had no misinterpretation. It just struck me because I have had
to go through the process of changing the syntax so many times when
translating/editing. I save my brainfarts for trying to remember if I
ate lunch.
>   Or else a glitch in the program.
>
That, That, That, That is not not not a possibility. BB
>   JL
>
> Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Benjamin Barrett
> Subject: Re: Sacrificing factual fidelity for flow
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Ahh, I should explain why I find these to be so different.
>
> The strict meaning of "The first synthesizer became commercially
> available in 1964" equates the first synthesizer with the one that
> became commercially available in 1964.
>
> "The first commercially available synthesizer debuted in 1964" most
> likely means that after research, the availability of handmade
> laboratory synthesizers, model improvements, etc., a commercially
> available was developed and debuted in 1964.
>
> These describe very different product developments. BB
>
> Dave Hause wrote:
>
>> Aside from personally seeing no difference in the two meanings,
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Benjamin Barrett"
>>
>> The first synthesizer became commercially available in 1964.
>>
>> My understanding of this is that the likely interpretation is that "the
>> first commercially available synthesizer debuted in 1964",
>>

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