"Every single person in here is related"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Jun 13 23:30:30 UTC 2012


OK, here's the background:  reporter Ali Reed on News 8, WTNH TV (the local ABC affiliate in New Haven), promoing an upcoming segment, is pictured in front of a classroom in what turns out to be Greenwich High.  She teases:

"This high school classroom in Greenwich may *look* like any other class, but it's not. I'll give you a clue: every single person in here is related."

The real clue is the sub-thingy (what are those stationary crawls called again, when they don't actually move?), which reads: Teeming With Twins.  Yes, it's a classroom in which each student is related to some other student present--they're sets of twins or braces of triplets. (Turns out there 18 sets of twins and two of triplets in the freshman class, apparently some sort of record.) I couldn't describe that situation as one in which "every single person (in here) is related", which for me can only refer to a situation in which everyone in the room is related to everyone else in the room--one big happy (or not so happy) family.  Or maybe it could mean that everyone in the class is related to someone, which is *certainly* true (if uninformative).  But what it *can't* be used to mean is that everyone there is related to someone else there.  YMMV.

LH

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