Today’s edition of the comic “Non Sequitur” has this line in it:
You have 1,227 messages of which,#[1] only two aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic that they can be read without making your head explode.
This is another example of how too many negations tax the semantic performance of the linguistic brain.
Think about it. The writer is first identifying the property of messages that they are so mind-numbingly moronic that they cannot be read without making your head explode. And then, he wants to say that only two of 1,227 messages do not have that property. But as soon as he tries to do that, the negation on can vanishes.
Compare his sentence to what it should “really” be:
You have 1,227 messages of which, only two aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic that they cannot be read without making your head explode.
Trying to process these sentences certainly threatens to make my head explode.
[1]: What’s with that random comma?
This reminds me of Buchowski’s Paradox sentence:
Which is uttered in a context where Anegla has exactly two brothers, both of whom are older than she is. The sentence may be true in such context, but the way it is constructed is odd and it is certainly difficult to process it.
Paradoxes almost often involve negation (¬) and contradiction, and sometimes the relations less than or equal to (≤) and more than or equal to (≥), which is the case of Buchowiski’s sentence. Perhaps, some classic instances paradoxes are not but sentences that are not well constructed.
June 21st, 2005, at 10:36 pm #So- only 2 messages are just mind-numbingly moronic ”enough” that they can be read w/o… making one’s head explode?
I’m an amateur here but I thought about what the speaker might be trying to convey. The sentence does have the flavor of actual speech.
would
‘You have 1,227 messages of which, only two aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic- they can be read without making your head explode.’
do anything for anyobdy? maybe even add a period instead of the dash or the original “that”? make it 2 sentences. and the meaning seems crystal to me. Make it a “so” instead of a “that”. RO switch the so and the that. It’s a shittily placed “that” that makes the sentence so fancy. I guess we’re not here to clean up or clarify the message, but at least convey it correctly, yes?
our choices, essentially, if any, are between:
“2 aren’t so moronic that they can be read w/o”
“2 aren’t so moronic that they can’t be read w/o”
what does it mean to be as moronic as the passage suggests the other 1225 messages are? do people do psycholinguistics on this site cuz I might be headed that way fast if I keep typing. I get the extra negation problem now that I think about it. hehe. people talk so crazy sometimes. don’t get me started. cuz I will. sike.
only 1,225 of which are so moronic they can’t.. k, I’m done.
July 8th, 2005, at 2:19 am #trackback didn’t work so here is a link to my post:
http://benwoodward.nfshost.com/2005/07/18/what-is-wrong-with-this-sentence/
July 18th, 2005, at 2:49 pm #here is my explanation of what i percieve to be wrong with the sentence in question…
the problem is that the word ‘that’ is potencially refering to two things;
1.the two messages THAT don’t have this property
or is it being used in the defining of the property:
2.so moronic THAT they cannot be read without…
example:
1.only two aren’t so moronic.. THAT they don’t have the property
2.so moronic THAT they.. [definition of property]
to remove the double referencing with the misplaced ‘that’ you need to make it into two sentences, as kzzl said.
my way of fixing this sentence would be to put in another ‘that’ so that the ‘that’ in the original formation of the sentence is no longer making a connection to two properties.
i.e. “You have 1,227 messages of which; there are only two THAT aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic THAT they cannot be read without making your head explode.”
i think the author of this sentence put the comma where they did because logic was telling them that the sentence needed to be broken into two, but they didn’t know how. the comma was a compromise between the logical side of the brain, and the frustrated emotional side that was trying to write it.
the word ‘that’ is a very crafty one, that always threatens to boggle it’s users. it can be used to define a property as well as reference something that has a pre-defined property.
i am now in need of a serious head massage!
July 19th, 2005, at 4:54 am #