An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
mcsweeneys.net
An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#2Reading this, I was struck by how it reminded me of a talk that slowly warped and wrapped a statement to build up the Y-combinator. The process takes a self-referential function and slowly works the self out of it.
Honestly, I'm not at all sure turning a function anonymous is actually similar to making a sentence passive, but maybe re-watching that video now I'll have that je ne sais quoi that'll let me actually grok the process.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#3Wow, that was somehow one of the hardest-hitting articles I've read in a while. It's like constructing a huge lemma and then using it in a one-liner proof of a completely unrelated theorem.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#4Reading this, I was struck by how it reminded me of a talk that slowly warped and wrapped a statement to build up the Y-combinator. The process takes a self-referential function and slowly works the self out of it. Honestly, I'm not at all sure turning a function anonymous is actually similar to making a sentence passive, but maybe re-watching that video now I'll have that je ne sais quoi that'll let me actually grok…
I think that 'je ne sais quoi' was just Jim Weirich, he was very very good at teaching.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#5Affirming the consequent. Jumping to conclusions. Appeal to emotion.
Also, there's a reason they use language like this. Namely, say they wrote the sentence you arrived at; what do you think the reaction would be? Riots, right? Violent, righteous riots. Sounds good - up until the mob gets to the hospital and finds the involved officer's partner there being fixed up after getting shot three times in the chest. Feels silly, right? You don't do major things when you don't know what happened. And that's why they use this language: they don't know what happened either, and until they do they're not going to say what happened.
Don't jump to conclusions.
Finally: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#6I am reminded of the great George Carlin speaking on a similar thread, on language is used to mask truth, in particular the example of PTSD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAj6cXHrWdQ
Even when we recognize that something is intentionally sterile or vague, it's impressive how much we just move on.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#7"A fox was brown" is a perfectly ordinary sentence in the active voice. "Speed was involved in an incident" can also be parsed as active, if "involved" is an adjective. If the sentence is passive, then the active equivalent is "An incident involved speed", which is hardly any better.
That "ultimate in passive voice" is certainly convoluted, but it has very little if anything to do with passive voice.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#8Affirming the consequent. Jumping to conclusions. Appeal to emotion. Also, there's a reason they use language like this. Namely, say they wrote the sentence you arrived at; what do you think the reaction would be? Riots, right? Violent, righteous riots. Sounds good - up until the mob gets to the hospital and finds the involved officer's partner there being fixed up after getting shot three times in the chest. Feels s…
> Namely, say they wrote the sentence you arrived at; what do you think the reaction would be? Riots, right? Violent, righteous riots.
Uh, there's riots anyway. Not buying your argument.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#9This is actually quite creative because it leaves a lot open to ideological interpretation. The author is progressively making a sentence more ambiguous in an attempt to deconstruct propaganda, but with the last two images ends on a blatant example of propaganda of their own doing! The difference being many consider the latter to be morally righteous. As such, what is and isn't loaded is in the eye of the beholder.
I don't think that was his intention. He likely believed his conclusion was sincere. But that's how I read it, and it becomes even greater for it.
Re: An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
#10"We have finally fully arrived at the ultimate in passive voice:"
No, the ultimate in the passive voice had already been attained [nb, passive voice omg] with "the lazy dog was jumped over by the quick brown fox". The passive voice is not an obfuscatory technique, and the further obfuscations have nothing to do with grammatical passivity. Indeed, "Speed was involved in a jumping‑related incident with a lazy dog while a fox was brown" does not contain a single instance of the passive voice. In fact, as soon as we get to the "was involved" parts of the article, we no longer have the passive voice around.