Or, if you prefer, controsentences. Matthew Reisz posted in Facebook:
Are there many examples of sentences which can be interpreted in two completely opposite ways? I came across a striking case the other day and thought I’d do a nerdy post about it in the hope of encouraging people to come up with their own.
My wife was very ill during the pandemic, spending several weeks alone in hospital while largely cut off from family or friends. When we were recently discussing how she managed to get through this horrible ordeal, my son said to her: “You never lost your temper.”
Initially, I was pretty startled by this statement, since I certainly remember her lashing out at incompetent or irritating nurses (although she usually apologised afterwards), not to mention the tiresome people who came up with bland platitudes to try and cheer her up.
But then I realised Julian meant something else. Françoise had never “lost her temper” in the different and slightly more unusual sense that she had never lost her capacity to get angry – just as one might say that someone had never lost their sense of humour or their optimism during hard times.
In other words, she demonstrated that she had not lost her temper (in one sense) precisely by losing her temper (in another). Or, to put it the other way round, losing her temper was actually a sign that she had not lost her temper! It would be hard to find a more perfect example of a sentence which meant both one thing and its exact opposite. And that set me wondering how common this is.
He goes on to talk about “words, known as contronyms, which can mean both one thing and something close to its exact opposite,” but those are more common and more familiar; the sentence thing is interesting — though with regard to this particular example, I agree with Kathryn Gray, who commented:
While I get what you mean, and it’s strictly correct, ‘losing your temper’ is so *in* the English language as idiom for ‘becoming angry’ that I would and could never think of it in any other way or assume any other meaning is intended by the speaker than ‘becoming angry’.
And just to prove I’ve never outgrown my twelve year old self in a metal working class, (the guidance counselor called my parents in to berate them for letting me take “non-academic” courses, and got his head handed to him along with a stern lecture about honest work…),
I immediately thought of “temper” in the sense of increased strength and elasticity. Is there a term for sentences with more than two meanings?
Saying that “ambisentence” must have two and only two potential readings, presumably because the Latin etymon of the ambi- prefix typically means “both,” seems a little Etymological-Fallacy to me. An “ambiguous” sentence can have more than two possible readings, can’t it?
Don’t lose your temper
Don’t lose your temper
Don’t lose your temper
’Cos I love you when you’re wild
Don’t lose your temper
Don’t lose your temper
Don’t lose your temper
’Cos I’d hate you to grow mild
–XTC
An “ambiguous” sentence can have more than two possible readings, can’t it?
Sure, and third-hand sources confirm that ambidextrous can apply to quadrupeds.
My favorite: *You’d be lucky to get him to work for you”
This 2010 Language Log post and comments have a few ambiphrases. Two fruitful areas are literal-v-idiomatic and varying negation scope. My favourite is “not an option”, also mentioned in 2011 at LH, along with opposing metaphors of the direction of passage of time (“move the meeting forward” etc.).
“You’d be lucky to get him to work for you”
Not an example, but it reminded me of the supposed army “recommendation”: “This officer has performed his duties to his complete satisfaction.”
(I first came across this as a remark from an old-school retired Brit colonel, commenting on the deportment of Oliver North testifying before Congress.)
I avoid using “forward,”“backward,” “ahead,” and “back” with time because I can’t guarantee how they’ll be interpreted.
I also remember when I was younger being told that I was wrong for describing a location as “up the road” when it was clearly(?!) “down the road.” So that’s another pair I consciously avoid.
I don’t know, You’d be lucky to get him to work for you could mean both the person is an exceptional worker and the person is a useless worker. But I may be missing your meaning
“You’d be lucky to get him to work for you” only has one meaning for me. He’s a lousy worker.
If you want to praise him, “You’d be lucky to have him work for you” would come closer to the desired meaning.
Contronymous verbs like sanction and cleave easily turn sentences into ambisentences.
@BLCKDGRD:
I put it poorly (indeed, ambiguously): your example is an ambisentence; by “not an example”, I meant the Oliver-North-dissing one (which I have long treasured.)
On 2 November 1952 two youths, Craig and Bentley, were on the roof of a warehouse in suburban London, intending to burgle it. Craig was the ring leader, and had a gun.
One of the police who followed them quickly arrested Bentley. Bentley tried to break away at first, but after that he was quite docile throughout the incident and did not try to escape when he could have.
Bentley called out to Craig: “let him have it, Chris!”
Craig shot and wounded the policeman.
Did Bentley mean “Shoot him!” or “Give him the gun!” ?
I had a linguistics prof who liked to use “I cannot recommend this student highly enough” as an example in my semantics class.
While we’re on work, let’s not forget the classic “how many people work here?
I once blogged about “The last person to know everything”, which features scope ambiguity. I initially read it as describing someone who’s out of the loop, with every piece of news reaching them last; the intended meaning of the article I spotted it in was to describe a specific scholar of the early renaissance when it was still plausible (if very very hard) to acquire all human knowledge (“that matters”) within a lifetime.
@Peter Grubtal: As I recall, when Pope John XXIII was asked how many people worked at the Vatican, his usual answer was, About half of them.
So Julian said Françoise had never “lost her temper” but meant that she had never lost her capacity to lose her temper. I’d say that was just a slip of the tongue (or of the brain), not an ambiguous sentence.
Headlinese can create ambiguities. For example: ‘Ivanka Trump asked to cooperate with Capitol attack committee’. Did Ivanka ask, or did the committee ask? Reading the article showed that it was the committee that asked. I would prefer the clearer ‘Ivanka Trump was asked to …’ (However, if Ivanka really did do the asking, the headline probably would have been ‘Ivanka Trump asks to …’)
There was a caller to a Danny Baker Saturday morning show who was an apprentice back in the day with one day a week at vocational college, where he wasn’t really doing any of the ‘academic’ side of his work and study obligations. He said he wasn’t surprised when his work boss called into the office and he expected a dressing down, but instead received a bonus. The boss said, “We’ve never had one of our lads with such great results! Keep it up.”
What did college say?, he asked.
“All your essays are outstanding!”, said his boss very proudly, but it did motivate him to crack on and actually get the essays done.
However, if Ivanka really did do the asking, the headline probably would have been ‘Ivanka Trump asks to
Yes, and expecting headline writers to insert extra words is a mug’s game. They’re interested in brevity, not possible ambiguity. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t see any ambiguity; I automatically translated “asked” to “was asked.”)
Stevie Wonder: “I was made to love her”
What hat said. Also “all your essays are outstanding” wins the thread for me.
I also remember when I was younger being told that I was wrong for describing a location as “up the road” when it was clearly(?!) “down the road.”
That “clearly” could have been south, or down in elevation, or in the direction of lower address numbers, which is often toward the center of a city, which is down in elevation if the city center is where the city was started on a body of water.
The town I live is north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but considerably lower in elevation, so some people go “down to Santa Fe” and some people go “up to Santa Fe”. However, I think most people would interpret “down the road” and “up the road” in the usual way, meaning the direction the speaker was going—I haven’t heard anyone correct anyone here the someone did to Craig.
(As an exception to my comment on bodies of water, “downtown” in Santa Fe is higher than the majority of the city, I’d guess.)
Interesting; OED (entry revised 2018) says:
I wouldn’t have guessed elevation had anything to do with it. (First cite 1770 “That evening, at the cry of fire, I came out of my house, and saw the people running down town, and I followed them,” Trial of William Wemms 40.)
To the extent there is some non-random pattern in “downtown” v. “uptown” or “down to X” versus “up to X,” I’m not convinced it extends to “down the road” versus “up the road” where the variation seems more random. Note that upstream v. downstream is definitely non-random, but applying “direction of current/flow” metaphorically to a road will not necessarily lead to strong intersubjective agreement as to which direction is which, esp. since many roads have fairly similar amounts of average traffic in both directions. While downstream v. upstream is driven as a matter of physics by relative elevation above sea level, the “grade” of some rivers is often so close to flat that I’m not sure we can presume people are actually thinking of downstream as equivalent to downhill.
Là-bas just means “out of pointing range”.
My late mother used to work in the administration of a university.
Many people probably have heard the famous endorsement “I cannot recommend this candidate too highly.” “Waste no time in reading this book”, and so on. Mum collected sentences like this, with a special focus on ambiguous recommendations in letters and candidate references.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to save this valuable resource. But she had a couple of pages of typescript.
Other favorites: “You can’t put too much water into a nuclear reactor.” (Saturday Night Live)
“This book fills a much-needed gap.” That’s just barely ambiguous—the usual meaning is the non-compositional one “This book is useful,” and it’s very rarely used to mean the gap is needed. QI (see also the sequel to that post) couldn’t find evidence that Moses Hadas had said it with the literal meaning, as I’d believed until just now.
@DM: What does ici-bas mean?
@Hat: I don’t know the history of “up” and “down” in Manhattan. I wonder whether it’s the direction of the Hudson’s flow, though it’s tidal there, or up on maps, or something else.
Edit: I see the trial of William Wemms et al. was for killing Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre.
There are also sentences that change meaning depending just on where the emphasis is placed. For example:
“I DIDN’T steal your car.” (Simple denial)
“*I* didn’t steal your car.” (Someone else stole it).
“I didn’t STEAL your car.” (I borrowed it, or did something else with it).
“I didn’t steal YOUR car.” (I stole someone else’s car).
“I didn’t steal your CAR.” (I stole something else, like the radio).
You can add complications for more meanings, like “I never said I didn’t steal your car.”
Thanks to the BBC’s un(?)intentional ambiguity department for today’s video headline.
“ Watch: Passengers escape car hit by drone in Russia. “
How many passengers can you fit into an escape car?
I see the trial of William Wemms et al. was for killing Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre.
I’ll be damned — thanks for digging up that tidbit!
The indictment has it as William Weems, at least as transcribed here: https://www.famous-trials.com/massacre/201-indictment. But maybe one or another transcription is wrong or maybe multiple spellings coexisted back in 1770.
in nyc, it’s almost always “into the City” from the boroughs, and “up/down” as relative “north/south” within them (with “over in” sometimes in the mix to indicate “east/west). i was over in ridgewood yesterday, but my friend who lives down in flatbush didn’t come along – from which you can tell roughly where i live.
but i suspect that “down” meaning towards a city / town does have to do with elevation, whether directly or not, since cities and towns are historically almost always on rivers or at places where waterways meet bodies of water, and thus lower than the surrounding land.
i think of “up” in that sense as specifically british, and about institutions as much as urbanizations – “up to cambridge/oxford”, implying the university; “up to london”, implying the court or the City). but perhaps that’s because those are inland places: does one say “up to york” if it isn’t a northward journey? or “up to swansea”?
interested in brevity, not possible ambiguity
the older headline style of omitting the actor entirely (“Probes Vice Squad”; “Seeks Spree Killer”; etc) has gone out of style, but i do find it charming.
Là-bas just means “out of pointing range”
See Une leçon de piano au Saguenay
@Craig “I avoid using “forward,”“backward,” “ahead,” and “back” with time because I can’t guarantee how they’ll be interpreted.”
===
Prepone (frequent in Indian English) and postpone are unambiguous replacements of those words.
The google books ngram viewer not only shows “down the road” as notably more common than “up the road” it also shows “down to the store” more common than “up to the store” by a very roughly similar ratio. I doubt that the generic store is consistently >50% likely to be north of or downhill from the person talking about going there …
I should mention sur Paris.
I’ve never encountered that one. I suspect it applies to places in actual valleys.
No, an escape car for passengers would be a passenger escape car without the -s.
@JWB: Oh, you know, everything is going downhill…
The Israeli Hebrew slang expression חֲבָל עַל הַזְּמַן khavál al hazmán means, in free translation, ‘a waste of time’ (lit. something like ‘it’s a pity about the time’). It has come to signify enthusiastic praise, along the lines of “I could go on and on raving about it, but will spare you.” So if you ask someone about how their trip to X went and they answered khavál al hazmán, in principle they could mean ‘magnificent’ or ‘a waste of time’. I have been exposed to the spoken language too little for too long to judge, but I would guess that you wouldn’t use the expression with its older plain meaning anymore, for risk of confusion.
This is more involved than simple slangy reversals of meaning, like English “bad” or “sick”.
Coincidentally, Language Log posted today “No X is better than Y,” about a particular type of ambisentence.
The indictment has it as William Weems, at least as transcribed here: https://www.famous-trials.com/massacre/201-indictment.
Google ngram search has “Wemms” greatly outnumbering “Weems” right after the event. At the moment I’m not going to look for any more detail.
The 1771 trial report: “The Trial of William Wemms…”
Given that “Weems” is the more common spelling, it does seem more likely that “Wemms” was mistranscribed as that in the document I was looking at …
“God knows [that-clause]” == I’m certain
“God knows [wh-clause]” == I have no idea
Imagine you’re driving a train. Ahead there is a signal. Beyond the signal there is a siding or junction or whatever the signal is projecting.
Is the junction in front of the signal or behind the signal?
Unambiguously behind, as far as I’m concerned. It could only be in front of it if you’re looking at it from the other side. Or am I missing something?
cities and towns are historically almost always on rivers
There are many cities and towns in Germany whose name ends in -berg or -burg, and most of them were built on hills or mountains, often near a castle. (There are exceptions like Regensburg, named after a river, where the Burg actually was a Roman castrum).
Celtic oppida were originally built on hills. The Roman occupiers forced resettlement in river valleys.
Rome itself was originally a collection of villages built on hilltops (not necessarily seven); the low-lying area of the later Forum Romanum was originally uninhabitable.
Not to forget the Akropoleis of Athens and other Greek cities.
Settlements on hills or mountains are simply easier to defend.
@languagehat
The alternative view is that the junction is in front of the signal in the same sense that, if you’re the third person in a queue, the first person (further away from you) is in front of the second person.
Railways use the special terms “in advance of” and “in rear of” to avoid ambiguity.
There’s an interesting discussion of this in Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, Penguin p.184.
The alternative view is that the junction is in front of the signal in the same sense that, if you’re the third person in a queue, the first person (further away from you) is in front of the second person.
Doesn’t work for me in the railway example, as the junction isn’t moving with the train.
Re Up vs Down – for English trains there’s a long-standing convention that London is ‘up’, and anywhere else is ‘down’.
This originally came from the way timetables were printed, but was also reflected in everyday speech. For example, in Downton Abbey, the characters go ‘up’ to London, even though the titular stately pile is located ‘oop noorth’.
See wiki.
You go “up” to universities, too. So you can go up to Cambridge from London, and then back up to London from Cambridge. You might need to go back up to London in disgrace if you were sent down.
I once started mapping this out, because there are various places where towards and away from London aren’t obvious, but I can only remember now that Edinburgh is up from Glasgow.
thirded
Uphill in the snow both ways!
A train or traffic signal makes for a particularly unambiguous example, because the signal has a front and a back (ventral and dorsal, as it were).
“The Woman to See About Your Face
Melinda Farina, known as the Beauty Broker, sends Hollywood actresses and everyday women to doctors around the globe. In her world, the knives are always out.”
NY Times, Aug. 15, by Jacob Bernstein.
Before reading the article:
a) the knives are at the ready
or
b) the knives are out of the question?
a), because “the” doesn’t make sense in b).
As I wrote here in 2023:
Heard in a philosophy common room, aeons ago: “Is this cake anyone’s?” The two practically opposite interpretations occasioned much discussion.
Julian Mac:
The alternative view is that the junction is in front of the signal in the same sense that, if you’re the third person in a queue, the first person (further away from you) is in front of the second person.
Yes indeed.
Ambiguous “behind the comma” was noted and discussed here and here.
I don’t think “the” in “the knives are out of the question” “doesn’t make sense.”
nescit vox missa reverti.
Try and imagine Watson and Holmes:
“A case”
“We’re off.”
Without having glanced at the original article, my first inferences are to combine “face” “Beauty Broker” and “doctors”, and turn “face” into “face-lifts“, and “doctors” into “plastic surgeons“, specifically. Thus, “the knives are always out” can be inferred to mean “the scalpels are always out”, that is, at the ready in the hands of the plastic surgeons to perform face-lifts.
While I think the first inferences are reasonable by most modern cultural expectations, the writer might have been intending to undermine those expectations. It would be surprising but not impossible that the article could actually be about doctors who provide beauty treatments that specifically eschew surgery, and thus the second interpretation is actually intended.
And of course, “the knives are out” as a phrase usually means that people are ready to attack each other, usually in a metaphorical way. Maybe the author intended a double meaning — in addition to the “scalpels” interpretation, there might also be the sense of: “people are always ready to metaphorically attack women based on their appearance”, by making cutting remarks. As it were.
Thanks Owl (if I may).
At the risk of unnecessary dissecting, I was prepped in reading previously, in the Guardian, a movie puff piece cum account of Jamie Lee Curtis turning her back on plastic surgery.
Sentences with phrases like “couldn’t do better” can do this—either the thing is bad or the thing is fantastic.
Similarly, “I couldn’t get out of there fast enough!”
This isn’t quite a controsentence but seems to have a similar flavour: “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.” –Moses Hadas
“Any employee not fired with enthusiasm will be fired with enthusiasm.”
— possibly-apocryphal sales-department motivational poster
My mother used the expression “[That experience] took years off [me]” = my physical age shot up from the shock. Almost the opposite of the more common “[That outfit] takes years off [you]” = it makes you look younger.
“[That experience] took years off [me]” = my physical age shot up from the shock.
I would say rather = the shock hastened my death (so that I will live only to 85 rather than 90, say).
rather = the shock hastened my death — I don’t disagree. More fully, “my physical age shot up from the shock, thereby hastening my death”. (Deaths may be hastened for other reasons; for example, if it turns out Joey the Whacker’s kid has a recital on Thursday, prompting Fat Tony to bring the hit forward to Tuesday.)
Not the same thing. I read it as possibly, “I will be youthful and spry till I’m 85 and then keel over, rather than ditto 90.” What adds to that, in my mind, are the sort of statistics you read, like how smoking a single cigarette will statistically shorten your life by 2 hours or whatever.
Hmm. I think there are too many variables: one’s personal mental model(s) of the aging process; one’s assessment of society’s conventional model(s) of same; mapping an individual fixed expression onto one part of one other of those models. Semantics, amirite? Shrugemoji