"I didn’t save you because you’re not important."
[This is a guest post from Brett Powley]
I ran into something recently that I thought might be log-worthy. My wife was watching Van Helsing, the TV series, and I heard one of the characters say this:
I didn’t save you because you’re not important.
Now, what he meant was:
I wouldn’t have saved you if you weren’t important.
But the more I thought about this, the more I realised that he said exactly the opposite of what he meant. I wondered why I got the ‘right’ interpretation of this the first time, rather than the plain reading which would be something like:
You’re not important, so I didn’t save you.
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