An impressive moustache

March 29, 2016 @ 5:44 pm · Filed by under Linguistics in the comics

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Alon Lichinsky sent in a link to this P.C. Hipsta comic:

And a reminder of another attachment ambiguity joke:

March 29, 2016 @ 5:44 pm · Filed by under Linguistics in the comics


13 Comments

  1. D.O. said,

    March 29, 2016 @ 6:40 pm

    Speaking of the obvious, Groucho Marx had impressive mustache himself.

  2. Roscoe said,

    March 29, 2016 @ 7:57 pm

    I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith.

  3. Jerry Friedman said,

    March 29, 2016 @ 8:58 pm

    If we're doing attachment ambiguities,this is from no less than time.com:

    "Republican Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks about combating ISIS and democratic socialism at Georgetown University November 19, 2015 in Washington, DC."

    I suppose thinking he's a Republican is consistent with thinking that he's combating democratic socialism.

  4. Irina said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 12:12 am

    I had a temp job once typing reports about "small-scale farming in the field of [the Institute where I was working].

  5. Irina said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 12:13 am

    I had a temp job once typing reports about "small-scale farming in the field of [the Institute where I was working]. Very small scale, because the only thing around the Institute that could conceivably be called a field was the grassy courtyard about twenty feet square.

  6. D.O. said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 12:29 am

    @Jerry Friedman: maybe democratic socialism is a disease, which infected Senator Sanders, but he is combating it by enrolling in the Republican party. The only question is, what ISIS has to do with it and what is it doing in Georgetown university.

  7. Michael Vnuk said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 1:26 am

    Groucho's impressive mustache was actually greasepaint – something I didn't realise for many years. (According to Wikipedia, he grew a real mustache later in his career.)

  8. Michael Vnuk said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 1:30 am

    Did you know that humans eat more bananas than monkeys? Take me as an example: I've eaten several bananas this week, but I can't remember the last time I ate a monkey.

  9. Stan Carey said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 3:48 am

    Linguists love ambiguity more than most people.

  10. Brett said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 8:06 am

    @Michael Vnuk: For at least one season of Groucho's post-war game show You Bet Your Life, the introductory titles showed a cartoon of him with his famous oversized greasepaint mustache and eyebrows. It was jarring when the actual Groucho, with his normal-sized real mustache walked onto the screen immediately afterward. (Apparently, the producers of the show had originally wanted Groucho to do the show wearing the makeup, but he refused.)

  11. DF said,

    March 30, 2016 @ 10:39 am

    From The Naked Gun 2 1/2:

    Lt. Frank Drebin: Now, Jane, what can you tell us about the man you saw last night?
    Jane Spencer: He's Caucasian.
    Ed Hocken: Caucasian?
    Jane Spencer: Yeah, you know, a white guy. A moustache. About six-foot-three.
    Lt. Frank Drebin: Awfully big moustache.

  12. andyb said,

    March 31, 2016 @ 6:22 pm

    @Jerry Friedman: According to the Socialist Party USA, Bernie Sanders may be a plant by the capitalist establishment to destroy democratic socialism by redefining the term to mean social democracy. If someone could get them together with the Tea Party members who think Donald Trump is a plant by the liberal establishment to destroy conservatism by redefining it to mean big-government militarism… well, they'd probably still hate each other, but it might be an interesting conversation before everyone realized who they were agreeing with.

  13. Bloix said,

    April 1, 2016 @ 10:36 am

    There is a legal doctrine that deals with attachment and similar ambiguities that arise in contracts. Its called contra proferentem, meaning against the offerer, and it provides that when a term of a contract is ambiguous, it will be interpreted in the manner against the side that drafted the contract. The doctrine is often invoked in disputes arising from standard form contracts where one party did not have a lawyer or an opportunity to negotiate terms and merely accepted the wording (e.g., insurance contracts, sales agreements).

    What this means is that lawyers frequently engage in precisely the kind of creative misunderstanding found in the PC Hipster comic. This is one reason that legal documents are so hard to read: the drafters' first goal is to prevent a lawyer's efforts to generate ambiguity, not to write something intelligible to a lay reader.

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