Best pub for precisely 8.5km is decent

There's a sort of trope that Japanese has no swear words, and instead you insult someone simply by using the wrong level of politeness. As with all these things, it's based on a grain of truth (there are linguistically-encoded formality registers) but it's also really xenophobic and demeaning to essentialise cultures in this way, as it perpetuates racial or national stereotypes of Asians/Japanese people. Plus, you miss out on the actual interesting facts about Japanese honorific speech if you skim the surface like this (you'll have to go somewhere else for those, though, as I am not a Japanese expert). The truth is often more interesting than the factoid and I encourage you to learn more if you didn't know about this! 

So probably I didn't even need to bring that trope up apart from I like to share information about languages, but some things I saw lately reminded me that English (and any other language, probably) is also perfectly capable of being highly insulting without using actual insults, and we do it with pragmatics. 

First, a tweet from @mralanjohnsmith, his second appearance on this blog in recent times, included this photo and observation: 

"Decent staff 🙂" feels like shade at the staff of another café. pic.twitter.com/4vnzUsTzUr

— Alan ‘join a union’ Smith (@mralanjohnsmith) December 13, 2021

(Photo shows a cafe's outdoor A-board with things like 'awesome food', 'delicious cakes', 'the best brew', and 'decent staff'.)

Secondly, this one: 

There’s a pub in the village with a sign saying it has ‘the best pint of Guinness for 8.5km’ which is so incredibly specific it has to be a sick burn on some other pub

— Pro Pattys Day Account (@steveohrourke) March 5, 2022

Both of these seem to be maligning another establishment but not by directly saying anything bad. They in fact both just say good things about themselves. However, they do it in such a way that we fill in the blanks and infer a whole lot more. 

The 'decent staff' cafe has a lot of very enthusiastic words like 'awesome', 'the best'. So among these, 'decent' sounds like fairly low praise, meaning only tolerably good. I had a quick look on Urban Dictionary to see if the kids these days are using it in a more positive sense, and while there are a couple of entries with that sense, most have the 5/10 meaning. It seems strange, then, to put this on your advertising. The cafe could be saying that, if it's honest, its staff are only pretty good, but given that the staff wrote the sign, we might interpret it as more likely that they're comparing themselves to other places. Those other places may have good coffee, but this place has 'the best!' Those other places may have good food, but the food here is 'awesome!'. And by extension, if this place only has 'decent' staff, the other places must have less than decent staff, and the next level down from decent is, well, not good. 

The other sign, rather than saying too little, gives us too much information. If you said you serve the best pint for miles around, we interpret this to mean you think you're pretty good, but haven't literally done a taste test and got votes and so on. The non-specific nature of the claim means that it's not verifiable, because it's not meant to be. The pub next door might have something to say about it, but a pub five miles away can safely consider itself out of range of the claim. But as it says 'for 8.5km', which is a specific measurement, it just can't be interpreted as 'a large area' or 'a long way' in the way that a round figure like 'ten miles' could, so we wonder what is precisely 8.5km away. Is it, as the person suggests, that there is some other pub within that range that they're saying is less good? Perhaps the village is 8.5km in size, so it's a way of saying it's the best in the village? or is it, as I think I'd be inclined to think, that 8.5km away is a better pint? 

So few female cellists

I like a quiz programme, as I'm sure you know, more or less regardless of what the theme is. So I listen to Counterpoint despite never being able to answer any questions. In a recent one, there was an example of gender-neutral they, still relatively unusual on a mainstream media source like the BBC. The question began like this: 

Which cellist made their debut...

Of course, they is intended to obscure the gender of the cellist so as not to give us any clues. But then it interacted with centuries of gender inequality (meaning that classical composers and musicians are nearly all men) and the Gricean pragmatic principles that say you should be appropriately specific, and resulted in me getting an answer right for once, because it implied that the cellist was not a man, and I know precisely one not-male cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, and she was the right answer. 

Why did it imply it wasn't a man? Well, if the gender would have been a clue, then that more or less tells us that the gender was not male, because maleness doesn't narrow the field much. If you google 'famous cellists', the pictures are all men apart from du Pré. Even this article from Classic FM, where they probably tried to include a couple of women, has 13 men and 3 women. So the gender being a giveaway meant it had to be a distinctive feature of the person, so it had to be not male. 

Here is a really interesting article by Kirby Conrod on how this same principle works to sometimes implicitly misgender people, if you use they inconsistently or when you could or should have been more specific. And here is an old post about the contrast that becomes implied when Mrs and Ms are the only two options to choose from on a drop-down menu, because Mrs ought to be a subset of Ms, but has to be interpreted as distinctive if they're the two available options. 

Well, that's what he said...

On the music news on today's Radcliffe & Maconie 6Music show, the music news correspondent Elizabeth Alker was telling us about the Killers' gig being stopped halfway through. She said that from the start, the singer Brandon Flowers hadn't looked well and...

He started drinking what he said was a Chinese herbal remedy.

This caused Radcliffe and Maconie to ask her what it was then, if it wasn't a Chinese herbal remedy.

What? She just said it was!

See, what's happened here is that she explicitly said that the drink was a herbal remedy, but she implicitly communicated that she had reason to think that it wasn't. We can see this from R&M's response, and from the fact that the conversation continued and they said things like this:

Which you clearly think was a lie!
What reason have you got to doubt him?

It's handy, this implicature business. We can say all kinds of things without really saying them. There are two things interacting here, I think: contrastive stress and Grice's Maxim of Quantity.

The Maxim of Quantity is one of Grice's conversational maxims. These are principles that all speakers ought to abide by in order to keep conversation flowing smoothly. It gets interesting when speakers don't abide by them (which is a lot of the time), because we go through some complicated processes in order to keep the conversation from being derailed. We always assume that the person we're talking to is not flouting the maxims, so if they seem to, we work out a way in which they aren't. So if someone gives the apparently irrelevant response B to A's question, A will work out a possible meaning that makes it relevant and infer the intended meaning:

A: Do you want to go for pizza?
B: I'm on a diet.

B's being on a diet isn't an answer to the question, but A can work out that B means 'no' by assuming that B is being relevant, and therefore must be answering the question, and that the information provided must somehow have a bearing on the invitation. A works out how being on a diet might relate to eating pizza and fills in the gaps.

Here, Alkerpops (as she's known) seems to be giving too much information. She doesn't need to tell us that Flowers said it was a Chinese herbal remedy; we can work that out ourselves. By telling us too much, we have to assume that she's told us too much for a reason, and that it must be significant that he said that's what it was.

Secondly, she stressed the pronoun he. One job of stress in English is to contrast things. So you can say:

Sam wasn't the ring bearer, Frodo was. 

You're contrasting Sam with Frodo, in this case. If you don't mention two things, you can still be contrasting a thing, but you're contrasting it with either something from earlier in the discourse, or alternatively an implied contrasted thing. In our example above, he can only contrast with other people (things have to contrast with things of the same type), so she's implying that other people would say that it was something else:

He said it was a Chinese herbal remedy, but I think it was something a bit stronger. 

So we get almost the exact opposite meaning from what she said, with no difficulty, almost never any misunderstanding, and very consistent intuitions.