Semantics

After 3 years of traveling alone and spending 2 years telling others how to do it, I did something as stupid as forgetting my bag in the bottom luggage hold of the bus after I got down at Kyoto station on the freezing cold morning of 27th January, 2012. Luckily, I realized this within less than 2 minutes of getting down, and thus began a series of frenzied calls to a ‘Japanese Only’ emergency number.

Yay! A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a newspaper article in the HT messed up a sentence due to too many negative particles and ended up meaning exactly the opposite of what was intended. On the other side of the spectrum is a dialogue from The Big Bang Theory’s latest episode (S05E10, The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition). The moment I heard it, I whooped with excitement—a perfectly executed quadruple negative, I thought, just as Amy pointed it out for the whole world to notice.

New day, new linguistic fodder to chew on, and another quick note! From an article in today’s HT: “The SC had said that if there is no reason to disbelieve that the accused cannot be reformed or rehabilitated, a sentence of death would be erroneous.” The moment I read ‘no reason to disbelieve’, I knew there was a disaster waiting to happen, and I wasn’t disappointed. There are a total of 4 negating elements in this text (no reason, disbelieve, cannot be, erroneous) and you will see that the meaning is virtually impossible to compute naturally.

Another quick note while I spend my days doing uninteresting things. The front page of Hindustan Times today described another in the series of slipper-hurling incidents that have become quite fashionable in the last few years. This time, the hurl-ee, so to speak, was Arvind Kejriwal. The report reads— “The black flag-waving, saffron kurta-clad attacker, XYZ of Jalaun district, Bundelkhand, about 200 km north of Lucknow, attacked Kejriwal when he was about to reach the dais at Jhulelal park near Lucknow University to address a meeting on graft.

This is a quick note rather than an elaborate post—I was eating at Shakti (the Women’s Cell run lunch center at IITB) yesterday when a group sitting next to me was discussing what they perceived as a semantic ambiguity. The issue was the right term for the Swedish Embassy situated in India. Would it be the Indian Swedish Embassy, or the Swedish Indian Embassy? From what I observed, opinion was divided, but I wasn’t sure whether both sides really computed different meanings or whether one was just trying to play the Devil’s Advocate, trying to defend what might originally have been a mistaken utterance.