Television Without Pity Quote (Grammar)

[fabrisse]

Because everyone's gone all grammatical in the past week, I thought this was appropriate.

Miss Alli in her Amazing Race recap this week says:

"They close with one of my favorite grammatical forms, the irrelevant-disjunctive, when they say that people will think they're ditzy, but it's a game."

I'm hereby applying for the irrelevant-disjunctive to be an actual tense. I'll settle for it just being a mood, like the subjunctive, but really, it's so much more useful than that.

Favorite examples?

Comments

Re: Popcorn!

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I love it. Yes. That's it.

Re: Popcorn!

[moria923.livejournal.com]

If I make a statement and join two thoughts together, and you, the listener, don't see how those two thoughts relate to each other, that doesn't mean there is no connection; it just means that I haven't adequately communicated my train of thought, or that you haven't understood it.

In the TWOP example, the thought seems to have been something like: "People may think we look ditzy, but it's a game, * and it's OK to look ditzy while playing a game." * So if the listener hears an "irrelevant disjunctive", it means she didn't get the speaker's implied chain of reasoning.

Great popcorn story! thorbol and I were just having some fun with the different ways it can be interpreted. My own take is that it can't qualify as an "irrelevant disjunctive" because it involves more than one speaker. It seems you need one speaker connecting two thoughts that seem unconnected to the listener.

Actually, this may qualify as the OPPOSITE of anirrelevant subjunctive. When Muffy says "popcorn" and her listeners think her comment "remarkably honest", it is because the listeners are implying a chain of reasoning that the speaker has not intended.