[Ads-l] weird "which"

[Jonathan Lighter]

For the jaded ones who find nothing unfamiliar here, it's worth nothing
that some of us find the original sentence utterly disorienting , no matter
how humdrum it may be to non-specialists in cutting-edge syntax - and to
people with an imperfect command of standard English.

I had to read the original to my highly intelligent PhD wife no less than
*six* times before she could comprehend  precisely what words were in it.
She kept thinking that "what was wrong" was that the women only *think*
their hair looked thicker, or it only *appeared* to be thicker, or that
"full-size" could mean anything.

When I gave her the sentence to read with her own eyes, word by word, she
could make little sense of it. "One second I think I know what it means,
and a second later I don't!"

JL



On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:32 AM Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> > On Jun 23, 2020, at 5:37 AM, Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>
> wrote:
> >
> > This use of 'which' has been around for a long time, and it may even
> have been discussed
> > on this list,...
>
> I have been posting about summative relatives for a very long time,
> including repeatedly on this mailing list, starting with this Language Log
> posting:
>
> 5/21/08: "Why are some summatives labeled "vague"?"
>
> https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=178
>
> I am now weary unto death and cannot, will not, engage in this discussion
> any more, but I'm dismayed that nothing I have written on the subject seems
> to have had any effect at all.
>
> arnold
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 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."

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