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The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square th
by joshhug 1y ago
The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory:
"Why was the scarecrow given an award?"
"He was out standing in his field."
The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.
- cdkmoose 1y agoAlso, My friend accidentally drank a bottle of invisible ink... she's at the hospital now, waiting to be seen. "Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.
- genewitch 1y agoIn 1903 there was a proposal to inter corpses into crystal caskets. The success of that initiative remains to be seen. Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.
- simianparrot 1y agoFor some reason this old saying popped into my head reading that. I know it's not related but: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
- yojo 1y agoMy favorite part about that quote is the broken symmetry between the double meaning of the second sentence and the single meaning of the first. It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?
- anyfoo 1y agoGosh, after all those years I've only just realized the double meaning of "fruit flies". Thanks! Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.
- geodel 1y agoThis is hilarious. I never thought of a flying banana and now I can't un-see it.
- akoboldfrying 1y ago"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word. Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound: (Fruit) (flies) (like a banana) (Fruit flies) (like) (a banana) To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.
- abhpro 1y agoI assume stuff like this is why some languages or script can never be deciphered
- frogulis 1y agoEven spoken aloud, there's a natural-sounding stress pattern that is ambiguous. Love it.
- Aachen 1y agoWould marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?
- akoboldfrying 1y agoIt would definitely help with written English, but I can't see it helping with spoken. (Is there some rule in German that disambiguates togetherwritten nouns when spoken?)
- Aachen 1y agoI actually wrote about speech but thought it distracted from the question and removed it again No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
- hydrolox 1y agoI think this is an example of a Garden Path Sentence[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfl...
- j2kun 1y agoThe classic, "why did the chicken cross the road" also fits into this genre, but nobody seems to understand that "get to the other side" means "to cross over from life to death." Every time I explain this to someone they are shocked that they never knew this meaning.
- Upvoter33 1y agoThat is funny. We finally figured out this double meaning a few years ago and I have been on the same quest since.
- gwd 1y agoThat's a failure of the joke not to set it up -- one of the "top corners" of the square is missing. Chickens normally don't make an effort to get to the "other side" (as far as we're aware anyway). To make the square you'd have to do something where the context of "the other side" means past life into death. e.g., "Why did the spiritualist put his ear towards the road? To hear from the other side."
- jagged-chisel 1y agoIf you cross the wrong person, they just might send you to the other side. I don’t know how to make the chicken crossing the road use this meaning, but … well, there it is.
- wavemode 1y agoMy understanding is that that interpretation is an urban legend. Wikipedia attributes the joke to an 1847 article, which is phrased in a way that clearly isn't intended to have some deeper meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_road%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_...
- j2kun 1y agoTIL, thanks!
- notfed 1y agoIs it a coincidence though? You could have started with the phrase "outstanding in his field", recognize the double entendre, and simply consider whether it's anyone's actual job to "stand in a field". Scarecrow is one of many possibilities.
- thejohnconway 1y agoI think the meanings are pretty close though? Not coincidental: to be prominent in an area.
- preciousoo 1y agoIf you use TikTok, search up “to the untrained ear”. You’d love those. Maybe they’re on YouTube too
- KolibriFly 1y agoSquare theory might call it a diagonal overlay
- agos 1y agodid you read about the new corduroy pillow? it's been making head lines!
- adammarples 1y agoIt's pretty straightforward, top left "outstanding", bottom left "out, standing" connected as homonym, and then field on the right also homonyms. Both horizontals are phrases.