Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Things I Enjoy

A local lunch spot has a hand-written sign on the soft drink machine: "Water cups are for water only. No outside containers neither." The spacing and the handwriting make it clear that the "n" on "neither" was added after the message was written.

Why I enjoy this:
(1) Tautologies make me happy, particularly when there is any kind of justification for them (as it appears there is in this case). Water cups are for water and a is a.
(2) I love that in attempting to fix the second sentence someone only added a grammatical error where there was not one before. Good intentions led to a poor result. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something, and charming in its way.
(3) There's no particular reason that the "no/neither" pairing couldn't be correct, except that English has capriciously decided that it is not. In Spanish the double negative would actually be the correct concordance (ni/ninguno). (And I suspect the misapplication of a Spanish rule to the English sentence is the reason the change was made -- I'm sure this is some kind of metaphor, too.)

1 comment:

  1. Very good. I'm rather a fan of tautology myself (writing one at the moment which may of may not head blogward at some point).

    Thanks very much for visiting De Factoids.

    Best,

    AJN
    http://adamjamesnall.blogspot.com/

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