Hating Mondays more than Garfield

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Today's "Dilbert" (5/18/15):

Alice's statement, "I hate Mondays more than Garfield," relies on the shared social knowledge that Garfield, the feline title character of Jim Davis's long-running comic strip, hates Mondays. (See here for visual proof.) Wally must surely share in this knowledge, given that he mentions Garfield's lasagna-appropriating ways in his response. And yet he is intentionally misinterpreting Alice, with the hope that being uncooperative (in the Gricean sense) will mean that she's disinclined to speak to him further.

Wally's willful misinterpretation construes "I hate Mondays more than Garfield" to mean "I hate Mondays more than (I hate) Garfield" rather than "I hate Mondays more than Garfield (hates Mondays)." Thus it's similar to an ambiguous (or meta-ambiguous) sentence we discussed a few years back:

From the post:

"I love ambiguity more than most people" is of course ambiguous, since it could mean "I love ambiguity more than most people (love ambiguity)" or "I love ambiguity more than (I love) most people." And in the case of some linguists, both of those propositions may have positive truth values.

(For more on the ambiguity of "comparative ellipsis," see Jean Mark Gawron, "Comparatives, Superlatives, and Resolution," Linguistics and Philosophy 18:333-380, 1995.)

(Hat tip, Marc Sobel.)



30 Comments

  1. Viseguy said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 8:39 pm

    Do I infer correctly that the conversation in the cartoon takes place on a Thursday?

  2. AntC said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 9:51 pm

    @Viseguy err, no. It takes place on Monday (18th May). Wally's closing "One day down" means he's succeeded in not needing to talk to Alice until Tuesday. "Four to go" means he needs further similar ruses for the remaining four days of the week.

  3. Keith Ivey said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 9:57 pm

    AntC, it is odd that Alice says "Tuesday" instead of "tomorrow".

  4. D.O. said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 10:02 pm

    Unanswered question from the previous thread. What for Brahms got onto that card?

  5. Christel Davies said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 11:26 pm

    I'm guilty of this type of deliberate misinterpretation as a means of play. One of my friends (who introduced me to Language Log) calls me "willfully obtuse" for it.

  6. Michael Watts said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 11:32 pm

    Keith Ivey:

    I don't find that odd; to me, "don't speak to me again until tomorrow" is off in much the same way that *"give the president it" is off, and needs to be rephrased as "give it to the president". If you're dead set against using an absolute time reference, I'd say "don't speak to me again for the rest of the day", but not "don't speak to me again until tomorrow".

  7. Jeff said,

    May 18, 2015 @ 11:40 pm

    I initially interpreted Alice's statement as meaning she hates Garfield, even though I too am familiar with Garfield's "lasagna-appropriating ways."

    Maybe this is because I personally hate Garfield and know many other people who share that feeling.

    I just assumed that Wally, in the second cel, was just being cheeky.

    Obviously I was wrong, but I prefer my initial interpretation.

  8. Raul said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 12:49 am

    I'd like to see how it's translated into Estonian. As far as I can say before having my morning coffee, it seems impossible – you have to choose between nominative and partitive for Garfield. Any similar problems in unrelated languages?

  9. JQ said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 12:57 am

    @M Watts

    Can you explain exactly why you feel that "don't speak to me again until tomorrow" is off?

    I don't see how this is related to "give Michael it", which feels wrong to me as well.

  10. J. Goard said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 2:30 am

    I share @Michael Watts' intuition. "Until tomorrow" feels severely unidiomatic in cases where e.g. "all day", "for the rest of the day" are available, although it works in other cases, however rare:

    Billy will have been at camp from last Wednesday until tomorrow. That's the longest he's been away from home.

  11. Adam Funk said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 3:33 am

    As I've previously said elsewhere, "I like semicolons more than Kurt Vonnegut."

  12. Yuval said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 4:11 am

    Another clever — and more romantic — ambiguous variant is found in "Love You More" by Yehonatan Geffen, published (or at least performed) in 1996. There, in my interpretation, "more" is not a comparative of a subject-ranging lambda function, e.g., "hates Mondays" ("more than X hates Mondays"), nor an object-ranging function ("more than I hate X"), but rather the two-place predicate: "I love you more than any other thing" ("more than any X,Y such that X loves Y").

    I made a translation available at
    http://www1.ccls.columbia.edu/~ymarton/pub/translation/love%20you%20more%2020150228.htm

  13. Patrick said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 5:20 am

    My favorite variant is the bumper sticker that reads "Preachers do more than lay people."

  14. Bob Ladd said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 5:21 am

    Actually, I love ambiguity more than most people would not normally be ambiguous when spoken aloud. The misanthropic reading would have the main accent on people (I love ambiguity more than most PEOPLE) whereas the reading that acknowledges the odd interests of linguists would come out as I love ambiguity more than MOST people. It's probably possible to construct bizarre contexts where those associations of accentual pattern and intended meaning don't hold, but I think in most cases the observation is valid.

  15. Sandy Nicholson said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 6:03 am

    @Bobb Ladd: I don’t think the context has to be all that bizarre to restore the ambiguity in speech. For instance, I might first assert that I love ambiguity more than YOU (itself ambiguous between two readings) and then go on to say Indeed, I love ambiguity more than MOST people (which I think still has both readings in this context).

  16. Johan said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 7:56 am

    Regarding the ‘ambiguity’ line.

    I take the “I love ambiguity more than most people (love ambiguity)” meaning as being naïve and/or megalomaniac in claiming knowledge about what's in other people's minds.

    The “I love ambiguity more than (I love) most people” reading is, to my ear, much more sane, since it is only a reflection on one's own preferences.

    Personally, I hope that linguists are sane…

  17. Jeremy said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 8:07 am

    @Jeff

    I'm with you. Garfield sucks like an Electrolux.

  18. Andrew Bay said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 8:44 am

    Ambiguous date mapping (due to tomorrow vs Tuesday),
    When is "This weekend" the same as "Next weekend" and when are they different?
    Does "This" get collapsed with the tense in:
    "This weekend, I'm going to the car wash." vs "This weekend, I went to the car wash."
    But what about "This" vs "Next" in:
    "This weekend, I'm going to the car wash." vs "Next weekend, I'm going to the car wash."

    Random ideas.
    Andy

  19. Bob Ladd said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 10:14 am

    @Sandy Nicholson: Good one. I agree that works as ambiguous.

  20. rosie said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 11:29 am

    @Andrew Bay. They're different when "take the next turning on the right" means take the second right (the first right being "this").

  21. David Hellsten said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 2:04 pm

    @ Raul; It would be impossible in any language where nouns have case markers. In Albanian, you'd have to use Garfield-Nominative or Garfield-Accusative, and the ambiguity is lost.

  22. Roger Lustig said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 2:18 pm

    @Rosie: You're never going to navigate in *my* car.

  23. Michael Watts said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 4:13 pm

    David Hellstein:

    [Preserving this joke] would be impossible in any language where nouns have case markers.

    This is not true; Latin has noun case, but you can still make this sentence ambiguous. In a Latin comparison, you can use quam + a noun in the same case as the thing it's being compared with (so "I hate Mondays more than Garfield does", using quam, would have 'quam Garfield-nominative', but "I hate Mondays more than I hate Garfield" would have 'quam Garfield-accusative') — but you can also just use the ablative case; if you went with that approach, the first sentence, instead of 'quam Garfield-nominative', would have 'Garfield-ablative', and the second sentence, instead of 'quam Garfield-accusative', would also have 'Garfield-ablative'.

    This assumes that Latin declines the foreign name Garfield at all; I seem to remember that the Vulgate bible doesn't use case markers with the Hebrew names, which makes ambiguity even easier. But for this kind of comparison, the potential for ambiguity is built right into the language.

  24. Pflaumbaum said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 4:52 pm

    It's interesting that people seem happy to tolerate this kind of ambiguity in general, but get sniffy when pronouns are involved – ie "than me"/"than I".

    We had an interesting discussion in comments a few years ago about the two different models of what's going on syntactically in these cases:

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3060

  25. Gene Callahan said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 7:44 pm

    @Johan: 'I take the “I love ambiguity more than most people (love ambiguity)” meaning as being naïve and/or megalomaniac in claiming knowledge about what's in other people's minds.'

    Oh for Pete's sakes, Johan, each and every one of us must make judgements about what is in other people's minds all the time! I love Thai food more than does my wife. I love T. H. Green more than most people do. Your objection is megalomaniacal.

  26. Viseguy said,

    May 19, 2015 @ 8:12 pm

    @AntC:
    > @Viseguy err, no. It takes place on Monday (18th May).

    Viseguy errs, yes. Often. Thanks for setting me straight. I probably couldn't parse it correctly because the older I get, the shorter my attention span for snark. And there's so much of that around these days, isn't there?

  27. David Hellsten said,

    May 20, 2015 @ 2:51 am

    @ MIchael Watts:
    OK, I didn't know that about the Latin ablative. TIL something!
    My main experience is with Albanian, which does generally decline foreign names, at least in speech, and biblical Greek which uses the declined article with names. AFAIK the ambiguity is impossible in both.

  28. Mark S said,

    May 20, 2015 @ 6:29 pm

    "Republican [Rand Paul] takes to Senate floor hours before deadline to renew justification for NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records"
    (from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/rand-paul-nsa-invasion-privacy-deadline-looms ).

    I read this as "Republican takes to Senate floor, hours before deadline, to renew justification for NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records" and I thought, "But that's the exact opposite of what he wants!"

  29. Graeme said,

    May 22, 2015 @ 4:52 am

    Being unAmerican, I read the first pane literally.
    Having no idea what's in any cat's head, let alone a cartoon cat I'm not exposed to daily ('the funnies' ceased in Australian daily newspapers years ago), I assumed one popular strip about human deadweights was having a go at another about a feline deadbeat.

  30. Mark Mandel said,

    May 23, 2015 @ 11:16 am

    @MarkS: So did I! I needed several rerereads (oops, nice typo, that) to get the evidently intended meaning,
    "Republican [Rand Paul] takes to Senate floor hours before [deadline to renew justification for NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records]"
    instead of
    "Republican [Rand Paul] takes to Senate floor [hours before deadline] to renew justification for NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records"

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