Letter to the Times, June 23, 2000:
Sir, The shortest ambiguous sentence I have come across is a road sign found everywhere in New York. It consists of three words: ‘Fine for Parking.’
But I would not like to argue the point with a New York traffic cop.
Yours faithfully,
Millett
House of Lords
10/16/2023 UPDATE: From reader Brieuc de Grangechamps:
A puzzle by Henry Dudeney:
“It will be seen that we have arranged six cigarettes so as to represent the number 57. The puzzle is to remove any two of them you like (without disturbing any of the others) and so replace them as to represent 0, or nothing.”
My neighbor has been stealing my newspaper. And when I confront him, he apologizes with a sarcastic, condescending air, as if to say that he’s surprised I can read at all. I find it impossible to forgive him, but then I learn that he’s about to lose his job. He’s an aging executive with a large family to support, and I’m sure that this misfortune will soften his scorn and make him more sincerely apologetic. I decide to forgive him when all this happens.
This seems odd — if I’m sure that he’ll lose his job and express real contrition for stealing the paper, why do I have wait for this to happen? Why can’t I forgive him now?
Another twist: I learn that I (and only I) can save his job. This would amount to doing him a large favor, so I feel justified in withholding my help until I’ve forgiven him. But is this fair? Can I refuse to help him until I get a sincere apology, knowing that this will happen only after he loses his job?
Xanthippe is angry that Socrates is late, but she knows that he’ll apologize when she starts making dinner. Knowing this, can’t she skip the dinner and just forgive him? “In other words,” asks Tennessee State University philosopher James Montmarquet, “knowing that he would apologize, may she not still forgive him — having elected, for quite good reasons, not to allow conditions apt for his apology even to take place?”
(James Montmarquet, “Planned Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44:3 [July 2007], 285-296.)
Once I read a book of 100 numbered pages with one sentence on each page. Page 1: ‘The sentence on page 2 is true.’ Page 2: ‘The sentence on page 3 is true.’ And so on to page 100: ‘The sentence on page 1 is false.’
On the second reading, page 100 changes the entire book. If page 1 is false, then the truth is ‘The sentence on page 2 is false.’ Likewise, page 2 becomes ‘The sentence on page 3 is false.’ And so on to page 100, which now should be read as ‘The sentence on page 1 is true.’
What happens on the third reading?
— David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 26:1 (February 1993), 44-55. See Yablo’s Paradox.
Add the same three letters, in order, both before and after the following to make a familiar English word:
ERGRO
Linguist John Quijada designed the experimental language Ithkuil to permit “maximal communication in the most efficient manner”: Cognition processes far more information than natural languages typically express, and natural languages are full of vagueness and ambiguity; Ithkuil tries to express deep levels of cognition precisely while making the speaker’s intent clear.
The results can be striking. The 19-word English phrase “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point” can be expressed in two words in Ithkuil. And the passage above reads “As our vehicle leaves the ground and plunges over the edge of the cliff toward the valley floor, I ponder whether it is possible that one might allege I am guilty of an act of moral failure, having failed to maintain a proper course along the roadway.” And both of these expressions indicate the speaker’s full intent directly, where natural languages would tend to leave their full meaning to be inferred.
No one actually speaks Ithkuil — Quijada says he regards it as “an exercise in exploring how human languages could function, not how human languages do function.”
(John Quijada, A Grammar of the Ithkuil Language, 2011.)
Entries in the keyword index of C. Bernard Ruffin’s Last Words (1995), a collection of the final utterances of famous people:
Minutes before his death, retired Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter told an aide visiting him in the hospital, “I hope I don’t spoil your Washington’s birthday.”
In 1913, as festivities were planned for the wedding of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s daughter, Berlin’s Hotel Adlon had to move the Kaiser’s brother-in-law from the fourth floor to the second because the tsar could not ride the elevator:
Russian court protocol governed every step the tsar took and nowhere did it mention an elevator. Thus there were no instructions for how the tsar and his retinue were to behave in such a situation. Should he enter the cab first? Was he permitted to keep his hat on? Who should operate the elevator’s crank? and God knows what else.
The protocol had survived unchanged from the days of Catherine the Great. Catherine, of course, had never ridden an elevator for the simple reason that there weren’t any back then, and that’s why the protocol contained not one word about this means of vertical transportation. … At any rate, an apartment on the second floor was prepared for Duke Ernst Gunther zu Schleswig-Holstein.
From Andreas Bernard, Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, 2014.
For his 2017 book Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt ran thousands of books through a computer to analyze the particulars of the authors’ use of language. Among many other things, he found that each of these authors uses the indicated phrase in more than half their works:
A few other interesting points:
Literary scholar Robert Hauptman calls this “marginal emendation run amok” — it’s a page from Henry James’ 1877 novel The American as James revised it anxiously for a new edition in 1907. He had decided the plot was unconvincing and asked for so many changes that two copies of the book had to be inlaid page by page on larger sheets to give him room to mark all the revisions.
On the last page, above, “James has partially or fully crossed out 16 of the 19 lines and rewritten the text for the definitive New York edition in the margins and at the foot of the page,” notes Hauptman. “His scrawling alterations cover virtually all of the generous white space and must be inserted in at least three different locations in the original text. Words are blotted out or struck in the new version, and as he approaches the bottom of the page, the lettering diminishes in size, because he realizes that he will run out of room.”
“The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour — to the best effect for the vile things, I’m convinced,” James had written to Grace Norton that March. Modern critics generally disagree — most editions today use the original version.
(From Robert Hauptman, Documentation, 2008, and Harvard’s Marks in Books, 1985.)
