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? 

They're really confusing as well

 I found a new thing on the internet to be annoyed by. 

On twitter, you can share links (of course) and you can write something about those links, and when you do, your comment appears first and then a preview of the link. When the link is an article, this is typically an image, the headline, and the sub-heading stuff. 

The process of you sharing this link is that you read it, you copy it into your tweet or click the share button to make it appear there, and then you write your comment about it before you tweet it. Therefore in your mind you've read the headline first and then your comment. But when someone else sees it, they see your comment first. 

This can be amusing, as in this tweet where the image (not of SpongeBob) doesn't match the comment about SpongeBob, which is just meant to give more information once you've got the main point of the headline below: 

The FUCK happened to SpongeBob?? pic.twitter.com/WrIIL7d0dA

— Zack Fox (@ZackFoxFilm) August 16, 2020

It can also lead to weird linguistic effects when the comment includes something that normally has to refer back to something else in the discourse. In this tweet, the comment refers to the discovery mentioned in the headline, and so tells us more about 'the molecule'. But because it comes first, we think 'what molecule?'. 

The molecule is based on a tiny antibody originally found in llamas, camels, and alpacas. https://t.co/YVMoc4d4PB

— VICE (@VICE) August 17, 2020

That's because the comes with a presupposition of existence and individuality; when you say the you're asking your conversation partner to accept that the thing exists, and that you both know which one you're talking about. If you've read the headline first, no problem - you've just been told it exists. If you haven't, as in the twitter format, you don't yet know it exists (you know some molecules exist, but you don't know the specific one under discussion here). 

Let's see another. This time, if you read the headline and blurb first, you can see they're asking for regular donations, and the comment tells you that you don't have to donate regularly if you can't afford it, you can also make a one-off donation. 

You can donate once too. https://t.co/3Kn4ZGTFQU

— Foolproof (Sylvia Suddes) (@bossproofreader) August 5, 2020

But if you read the comment first, you run up against two things: first it's pragmatically strange to read that you can donate once, as if there's a limit on how many donations you can make. Without the contrast with 'regular', we understand the meaning of once as 'once and once only' (that's some more pragmatics there). Then we get too and that needs to come after the first option, otherwise what's it as well as? 

Anyway, just a little quirk of the way the parts of the text are displayed, on this specific platform. 

English and American

I happened to be on a site where someone had asked what the difference is between Parmesan and Parmigiano-Reggiano (which are the same thing), and they got this answer:

Parmesan is the English and American translation of the Italian word Parmigiano-Reggiano.

This isn't the first time I've seen something like 'the English and American word for X' or similar, but it is jarring to me.

The thing that makes me have to stop and re-read it is of course that I'm interpreting English as the language, while the writer seems to be treating it as the country, and simultaneously conflating England and Britain/the UK. I know that to people in other countries, it doesn't seem very important that England and Britain are not the same thing (in Britain, we do a similar thing with Holland/the Netherlands) and furthermore, there is no adjective relating to the UK (UK-ish?), which would really be the more correct name anyway (to include Northern Ireland). But to me, England and the UK are not at all the same thing, and it is odd to say that something is English when it's clearly also British. This is a pragmatic implicature: you should give as much information as you are able, and here you're withholding some information (namely that the term is also used in other countries). And then what about Canada, Australia, Ireland and so on? Surely it's better to refer to English as a language here than to be unnecessarily specific about countries.

But I think there's more to it. Look at how it says 'English and American translation'. Most Americans are not idiots, contrary to the national stereotype that we like to believe in, and they know that they speak English rather than American. But a mixture of strong patriotism and some genuine confusion (actual people I know have been asked what language they speak when visiting America) means that it's sometimes tempting to write 'and American' to avoid people thinking you're just talking about England. I think many people probably do half-think of American as a language, even if they know that it's English really. And, of course, we might classify it as a separate language, if we so chose: language boundaries are not only determined by mutual intelligibility, as any linguistics student knows.

'Scare quotes'

Lately I've seen two very effective uses of scare quotes - the quotation marks you put round a word or phrase to indicate to your reader that you don't mean the word or phrase literally. 

There's a whole blog of scare quotes used wrongly or with unintended effect, including examples like this one:

This is the equivalent of doing the bunny-ears gesture when you say something (and it's weird that I just defined a writing convention by the gesture that clearly arose from the written form). 

Anyway. So there's this sign up in my department, because someone's phone is 'lost'. (I've removed the person's details so as, you know, not to put people's phone numbers on the internet without their consent, but if you've seen the phone let me know and I'll pass it on.) The sign looks like this:

Those magnificent scare quotes around lost convey, perfectly, this person's passive-agressive attitude to this: the phone is not lost, it has been stolen, but because the sign-maker has no evidence for this, he will keep up the pretence that it is merely lost. But you know who you are, phone-pincher.

The other scare quotes I saw this week performed a very different function. Our region is switching over to digital TV in September, and so 'they' (don't know who is in charge of this) have sent us a booklet telling us what will happen and what we need to do. One of the things we might need to do, if we have outmoded equipment, is buy a new telly. Luckily we're OK, but there might be some old people who need to buy a digibox but don't have a SCART socket on their telly (stay with me, we're going somewhere). The booklet tells them that if this is the case, they need to ask for a digibox with an 'RF modulator'. In scare quotes. This tells the reader, effectively,

Don't worry, we know all these technical terms are meaningless. You don't need to know what it is, just ask for this and you'll be given the right thing. 

The same punctuation mark, used in two different ways, to such different effect.

In the 'lost' sign, it's almost like lost and stolen are scalar implicatures, which means that stolen is a type of lost but more specific. If a phone is stolen it is also lost, but if it is lost it is not stolen (by implicature, as you would say stolen if you meant it, because you use the strongest term on the scale that is true).

In the second case, it's the use of quotation marks in the same way we might use them in academic or technical texts, when you use a term and need to show that you're using it as a term, for the first time. It's interesting, actually, that this is a type of punctuation that doesn't seem to need much explicit teaching. It must be an intuitive thing. Which might, of course, lead to the signs on the blog I mentioned earlier - the writers think they are defining terms, although they aren't really. The writer of the sign above thinks he needs to point out that (s)he is using the term 'urine drops'. Although why the writer felt the need to use the term 'urine drops' I really don't know.