The name of the place is Shenanigans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nGiven that it is an Irish Pub, it\u2019s hardly a surprise that the dining area would stimulate its public with various pieces of trivia and witticisms. Some of these witticisms extended beyond the usual humorous ones one would expect in a conventional bar setting and bordered on wisdom.\u00a0 One in particular opened vistas of thought about language, meaning, ambiguity, and humor.The witticism in question, which really caught my attention, asked the following question:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why does a dish towel get wet when it dries?<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The obvious answer, of course, depends on an equivocation in the verb to dry.In English, the action of drying can be interpreted as two distinct and opposite sequence of events. In the first, we have the passion – that is to say, the passive event – of an object as it dries out. \u00a0In this case, the object loses any water or other such liquid that it has been carrying or holding.\u00a0 An excellent example of this being the ground drying after the sun has come out after a rainfall.\u00a0 The object is simply bystander as it is subjected to the drying action performed by an external entity.\u00a0 In the second, we have the action \u2013 that is to say, the active performance \u2013 of the entity that performs the drying action.\u00a0 In the wet ground example mentioned earlier, the sun would perform the drying.\u00a0 In older language that, sadly, has fallen out of favor, the sun is the drier and the ground the \u2018driee\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting back to the witticism, the humor, obviously turns on the fact that the verb \u2018dry\u2019 is ambiguous in the present tense. Consider the two sentences:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The towel dries in the sun.<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
and<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The towel dries the dish.<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The first three words of each are identical with the same subject and verb. The only clue that the first is the passive sense and the second the active one is the inclusion of the prepositional phrase \u2018in the sun\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At first glance, one might think that indicator is sufficient and a bit of parsing here and a bit of coding with a lookup table there and one has taught a machine to tell the difference. Then one nips out to the pint and while drinking a pint of Guinness one realizes that the next sentence can be said with proper meaning and with equal probability of being either passive or active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The towel dries fast.<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s a machine to do, you may ask? Well\u2026 if it is to pass the Turing test it might randomly make an assumption and move forward or ask for clarification. If the machine were being really \u2018clever\u2019 it might do both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"