Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you

The 'normal' way of making a conditional in English is with an 'if'-clause:

If you hurry up, we'll be in time for the train.
We'll be in time for the train if you hurry up. 

There are plenty of others too, of course (As long as you keep walking, we'll be in time for the train) and of course -- isn't it always -- it's much more complicated than this, but there's also a cool way of doing conditionals with and and or.

Consider this warning, which I saw at Dreamland in Margate at their Screamland Hallowe'en thing a couple of years ago:

Don't touch the actors and they won't touch you.

Poster for 'Screamland' in Margate

You could interpret that as an instruction combined with a simple statement of fact: the instruction is not to touch the actors, and the statement is a reassurance that they won't touch you, independent of the instruction. That might in fact be what is intended here, because even if you do touch the actors, they're probably still not supposed to touch the visitors.

But we're funny things, humans, always looking for connections, patterns, reasons, and causes. Those two things being joined makes us want to think that there is some meaningful link between them. It's like if someone says The car is making a funny noise and Jen borrowed it yesterday. You can be pretty sure they're blaming Jen for the funny noise the car is making, and not just telling you two unrelated facts about the car.

Generally, in an and sentence, both bits are the same type: both statements, for instance, in which case they must both be true (so for the sentence about the car to be true, it must be true that it's making a funny noise and that Jen borrowed it -- notice that the inferred link that Jen was to blame does not have to be true). Or they might both be instructions, in which case you're expected to obey both (at the same time or in order), as in Sit down and shut up. Our example sentence, about the actors, is a mix of an instruction and a statement. So we might be expected to obey the instruction and for the statement to be true. I don't know about you but I don't really know where I stand right now, as there is no obvious link between my obedience and objective truth.

It would make so much more sense if, say, the truth of the statement was conditional on me obeying the instruction. So if I don't touch the actors (obey the instruction), then it will be true that they don't touch me. And all of a sudden, we have a conditional like the 'if'-clause type I mentioned right at the top, but with and instead.

Can we do it with or, a disjunction? Well, yes we can, but it comes out as a warning or threat rather than a deal or an agreement.

Don't bother the tigers, or they'll attack you. 

Now, we still have to obey the instruction but if we don't, then the second part will be true: a punishment, rather than a reward for our obedience.

We can even do it with neither at all, just so long as it is a proper threat and not just a warning:

Touch my stuff, I'll beat you up. 

Now the instruction is an elliptical conditional. There's probably an understood 'If you' at the beginning, or else the link between the parts is the same as with and: if the first part is 'obeyed' (the person does carry out the action), then the second part is true.

Explicit instructions

Instruction manuals ought to vary in size and detail with the complexity of the technology in question. Therefore, a car has a very detailed manual because it's a complicated piece of machinery, while a desk lamp has very minimal instruction because it just has one switch and one function. 

This isn't actually how things work, though. For one thing, sometimes we don't use all the functions of a thing: my desk phone at work came with incomprehensible instructions because it does fancy things, but I literally just use it to dial numbers and answer incoming calls. My washing machine came with a booklet but I just turn the thing to the same option each time and press 'on'. 

Other times, the manufacturers have just made the instructions unnecessarily complicated: my slow cooker just has one knob with Off, Warm and High but it needs a booklet of explanation so you can't sue them if you electrocute yourself or whatever. 

And sometimes, it reflects a change in our relationship with technology. Here's a photo of a hand dryer in the Quarterdeck in Margate (there's a side note about my collection of photos of hand dryers which I will relate at the end of this post): 

As you can see, it has the following instructions:

Shake off excess water
Place hands in dryer
Starts automatically

I expect that these instructions seemed fairly minimal when the thing was made, probably about 20 years ago. Now, though, I think this is more instruction than anyone really needs - we all know that you stick your hands under a dryer to make it work. We are used to things starting automatically. I doubt anyone except me reads these instructions and certainly not before they've already done what they say.

Compare this to something like a smartphone. Mine came with no instructions whatsoever. That's not strictly true; it has 'hints and tips' and a 'setup wizard' built in, which are instructions. But there was no manual. I can't remember what the first piece of tech I bought was that came with no manual, but I do remember it feeling a bit weird (it was on a CD that came with whatever it was). We are used to things now - we know that to work a gizmo you press the 'on' button and see what happens. Everything more or less works the same, and as you would expect. Things are relatively intuitive. So we don't expect careful step-by-step instruction on how to dry our hands. And I think manufacturers have got better at writing for their audience, and anticipating what you actually want to know and can understand.

So, that side-note. I have a collection of photos of hand dryers in Margate establishments because, adorably, the hand dryers are mostly made by this local company, Arlington Supreme. Everywhere else in the country, they're made in Honeypot Lane, Stanmore, Middlesex, HA7 2PY (yes, I know that from memory - if I look at words for long enough and enough times I apparently commit them indelibly to memory).

Annual check-up on my dialect

I moved to Kent two years ago now, or very nearly, and we've been properly living in Margate for just over a year (I semi-commuted for the first year between Canterbury and Newcastle). Seems about time to do the annual check-in with what language changes I've undergone in that time.

Margate Main Sands

It's notoriously hard to analyse your own speech, but I'll have a go. I do know that the very instant we moved here, I dropped almost all the Newcastle features I'd spent 20 years very slowly acquiring and enthusiastically embraced a southern accent. This is a departure from last year, when I was trying to create an identity for myself and was 'the Geordie', and played up my accent a bit. I suppose now that my partner is also here, who has a much stronger accent than me, I can't be the one with the Geordie accent. Maybe it's also to do with the fact that I'm now settled here, whereas last year I was still not sure I'd be here any longer than that one year.

Some accent features I spotted very quickly were a change in my long vowels, which I can't quite pinpoint but I think it's a slight lengthening and lowering (technical stuff - they're basically very slightly different), and l-vocalisation. This means that your l's sound more like vowels, or w's, so you say 'miwk' rather than 'milk'. In addition, I've been levelling my copulas (oo-er). That means that instead of saying 'I was' and 'we were', you say 'we was' - just using that one form. You can also do it the other way, and say 'I were', but I've not been doing that one. This is funny because they do a similar thing in Newcastle and I hardly picked it up at all, but I got the southern one straight away.

The the style style

Ages ago, I wrote about centre-embedding. I saw a different, much less common, example of it when I went to the excellent Mondria(a)n exhibition currently on at Turner Contemporary in Margate. The exhibition shows a thematically/chronologically-organised selection of his works, and in his later period, he was an important part of the movement known as 'de stijl'. In describing how this group worked, a display board used the phrase the 'de stijl' style. De stijl is of course Dutch for 'the style', meaning that the translation of this is the the style style!

One of Mondriaan's red and blue paintings

This kind of centre-embedding could only happen in a very particular context like this, where one phrase is in another language, because double articles, even when there's a legitimate reason for them, are really really ungood in English grammar. For example, I always have trouble with the Philip Pullman series The 'His Dark Materials' trilogy because the his is not a well-formed English string. The de stijl example even sounded wrong to me - that's why I remembered it.

Footnote: I bracketed the a in Mondria(a)n's name because it was originally Mondriaan, but sometime in around 1905-7 he dropped an a, perhaps to sound more French. One website suggests it was to sound more Armenian, which doesn't seem very likely to me. However, this 'names end in -ian' characteristic of Armenian is something that's really part of public awareness of Armenia - perhaps the only thing. It might be to do with Kardashians, though two other Armenians spring readily to mind: Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian, and Principal Skinner is of course really Armin Tamzarian. An acquaintance of mine actually told me, when we were discussing the exhibition, that Mondrian's name was Armenian, on account of ending in -ian.