Brain twister, think quick, when you see this, what do you think it means? A, B, or C?
"The pool is deceptively shallow"
A.) The pool is shallow.
B.) The pool is deep.
C.) Can't decide on the initial pass.
Jeff Nunberg speaks of this example in his book Going Nucular. It's actually fairly interesting, at least to my brain.
So if you think A.) then you are saying that the perceived shallowness is deceptive, and that it's actually shallower than you see. If you chose B.) then you're thinking the perceived shallowness is false in the other way, that it is deeper than it seems. From my reading, Nunberg's commentary on this is, well, for lack of a better expression: deceptive. Nunberg's sample were spread between the choices 1/3 each. If you are of choice A or B, you may think that the other 2/3 are stupid .
Okay, okay, so maybe after repeating several times, you've chosen A, or B... Try this one:
"This person is deceptively intelligent"
Are you smart? or Dumb? (So if he's deceptively dumb, then he's obviously intelligent and appear dumb, but if he's deceptively intelligent... then, he's dumb?)
I want to say that shallow is somewhat neutral in normal language usage for this to be a problem... but if we say that out loud
"That thing's certain characteristic is deceptively neutral"
"That thing's certain characteristic is deceptively extreme"
It is immediately clear that what we mean is "not neutral", and "not extreme" (aka neutral) respectively.
The weather is deceptively mild. (Actually the case in bay area)
So this means, to pathologize the problem, we need to find a concept that has no clear counterpart. For instance, if we say something is deceptively something precise, it maximizes the alternative:
"That girl is deceptively 5'6""
yields almost no information. But this doesn't always work.
"That girl is deceptively 18"
seems to have connotations. The connotation is not clear (too old? not old enough?), but it clearly says more than the height statement.
For the psychologists:
"That tent is deceptively green."
For the philosophers:
"This statement is being made deceptively."
And of course, for all CS people,
"This blog is deceptively deceptive."
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Right. So. There are affirmative usage of deceptively. For instance if I am deceptively cunning, it modifies cunning, saying my being sly, crafty, skillfulness is related with deception.
It seems that in the negative case, deceptively acts on the verb, while in the positive case it acts on the antecedent... err, the thing following the deceptively.
Post a Comment