{"id":115,"date":"2005-11-05T23:47:16","date_gmt":"2005-11-06T03:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=115"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:27:23","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:27:23","slug":"interesting-ambiguity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"Interesting Ambiguity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/althouse.blogspot.com\/2005\/11\/bloggers-back.html\">Ann Althouse<\/a> titles a post &#147;Blogger&#8217;s back&#148;. She means that the software package known as Blogger has returned from temporary oblivion, but I thought at first that she was describing a medical condition: something that might incline someone to see a chiropractor after too many hours hunched over a keyboard. All three parts of the sentence are ambiguous:  &#8220;Blogger&#8221; may be a copyrighted proper noun or a common agent noun, &#8220;&#8216;s&#8221; may be an elided verb or the sign of a possessive noun, and &#8220;back&#8221; may be either an adverb or an anatomical noun. All in all, a very compact illustration of why computers will never be able to translate English reliably. My favorite sentences of this type are the newspaper headlines &#8220;Police help dog bite victim&#8221; and &#147;British left waffles on Falkland Islands&#148;. In the latter, the first three words may be either adjective-subject-verb or subject-verb-object.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ann Althouse titles a post &#147;Blogger&#8217;s back&#148;. She means that the software package known as Blogger has returned from temporary oblivion, but I thought at first that she was describing a medical condition: something that might incline someone to see a chiropractor after too many hours hunched over a keyboard. All three parts of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-orbilius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}