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{{trope|wppage=Syntactic ambiguity}}
{{quote|'''Wesley''': I'm a rogue demon hunter now.
'''Cordelia''': Wow... so, what's a rogue demon?
|''[[Angel]]'', "Parting Gifts"}}
A simple statement becomes a bit of wordplay caused by an unclear use of a modifier. This is also known as a "[[wikipedia:Syntactic ambiguity|syntactic ambiguity]]" or "[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/squinting%20construction squinting construction]".
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[[The Other Wiki]] lists more examples [[wikipedia:List of linguistic example sentences|here]]. Note that this is easier to pull off in English than in most other languages, because English has neither grammatical genders (in French, for example, you would know that the feminine adjectives could only apply to the feminine noun) nor cases (in German, you would know that the dative adjectives could only apply to the indirect object of the sentence), leaving a lot more room for ambiguity.
Subtrope to [[Double Meaning]]. Compare [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma]], [[Prophecy Twist]], [[False Reassurance]], [[Exact Words]], [[Confusing Multiple Negatives]], and [[I Know You Know I Know]]. When used deliberately can substitute for [[Weasel Words]].
{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==▼
▲== Advertising ==
* Invoked in an [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EipLF3jiUk ad for Wolf Insurance]; that is, an insurance company owned by a person named Wolf, serving the Lehigh Valley. It shows [[Little Red Riding Hood]] going through the forest when she hears some growling, and brandishes legal documents before continuing unmolested, "Wolf Insurance" here implying insurance ''against'' wolves.
== [[Card Games]] ==▼
* The card game ''[[Munchkin (game)|Munchkin]]'''s [[Doomy Dooms of Doom|"... Of Doom!"]] card, resulting in "Bow with Ribbons... of Doom!", the question came up whether it was the bow or the ribbons that were 'of doom'.▼
** Then add in to this the "...of my Grandfather" card from ''Munchkin Fu'' and you can have such gems as the "Big Black .45... of Doom... of my Grandfather" which leads one to think that the gun killed the grand father.▼
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* Sometimes used as one of Roger the Dodger's scams in ''[[The Beano]]'', such as selling tickets to see the "Man Eating Fish"...which turns out to be a man, eating fish (and chips).
== [[Film]] ==
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* ''[[The Little Rascals]]'' had a three foot man eating chicken in a freak show. It was one of the kids wearing a fake mustache, and eating from a bucket of chicken.
* ''[[Airplane!]]'' has one character speaking of a "drinking problem" while narrating a flashback, and a second later we see he in fact meant a problem with his ''ability'' to drink, namely that he was spilling the whole glass on his face.
** ''Airplane!'' used this trope for a lot of its humor:
{{quote|'''Ted:''' It's an entirely different type of flying, altogether.
'''Dr. Rumack and Randy, in unison:''' It's an entirely different type of flying.
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'''Hanging Lady:''' First time?
'''Ted:''' No, I've been nervous lots of times. }}
*** Some of these are repeated ad nauseum and it was ''awesome''.
* ''[[Animal Crackers]]'': "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I dunno."
* From ''[[The King's Speech]]'':
{{quote|'''Bertie''': (telling a story to his daughters) This was very inconvenient for him, because he loved t-t-to hold his princesses in his arms. But you can't if you're a penguin, because y-you have wings, like herrings.
'''Margaret''': Herrings don't have wings.
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{{quote|'''Shooter McGavin:''' You're in big trouble though, pal. I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast!
'''Happy Gilmore:''' ''(laughing)'' You eat pieces of shit for breakfast? }}
== [[Literature]] ==
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(...) In the lefthand version of the third example, the reader's heart goes out to those 18 poor fellows frozen in a steel tank. }}
* Panda: ''[[Eats Shoots and Leaves]]''.
* The [[Discworld]] book ''[[
* In ''[[Blindsight]]'' by Peter Watts, a linguist intentionally uses an extremely ambiguous sentence to determine whether she's talking to an actual person or a mere syntax engine.
* In a ''[[Grail Quest Solo Fantasy]]'' game book, you enter a room containing 'a man eating plant'. The next line informs you that the plant he's eating is a carrot.
* From ''[[Nursery Crime|The Fourth Bear]]'':
{{quote|"The other three orderlies who accompanied him are critical in the hospital."
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'''Arthur:''' What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
'''Ford:''' You ask a glass of water. }}
* King Pyrrhus is said to have consulted an oracle of the god Apollo about whether he should fight the Romans. Apollo advised him "Aio te, Aeacida, Romanos vincere posse", (Ennius, Annales fr. 167). The sentence may be translated “I say, O son of Ajax, that you the Romans can conquer” –meaning either “You can conquer the Romans” or The Romans can conquer you”. (Cicero, De Divinatione ii. 56, § 116, remarked that it was odd that Apollo should speak in Latin.) This makes it [[Older Than Feudalism]]. The line became a proverbial example of amphiboly (ambiguous grammatical structure), and is quoted as such by Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part 2, I. iv. 62).
** It also seems somewhat accurate, given the nature of his [[Pyrrhic Victory]].
* ''[[
== [[Live
* ''[[Boy Meets World]]'':
{{quote|'''Topanga:''' And we're living in an apartment where a guy was shot over a salad, part of which was still stuck on the wall!
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'''Randy''': I did. It's the same thing.
'''Vince''': It's not the same thing at all! It's not even close! }}
* This is the entire point of the classic ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' sketch "[https://web.archive.org/web/20110424115723/http://www.hulu.com/watch/19190/saturday-night-live-robot-repair Robot Repair]."
* On an episode of ''[[Carnivale]]'', Stumpy did a spiel promising to show "the fearsome Man Eating Chicken." When the curtain was pulled aside, another carny was sitting at a table, eating... well, you can guess.
* An episode of ''[[Perfect Strangers]]'' has Larry and Balki trying to fix the plumbing in their apartment.
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'''C.J.:''' Your husband got eaten?
'''Abbey:''' My career.
'''C.J.:''' Yeah, well, I'm on dangling-modifier patrol.
|''[[The West Wing]]''}}
* When Wesley first showed up on ''[[Angel]]'', he announced that he had become a rogue demon hunter. Cordelia's response: "What's a rogue demon?"
* In an episode of ''[[I Love Lucy]]'', there was a comedic stage show featuring a "Man Eating Tiger"; Ricky holding a tiny, edible model tiger and taking a bite out of it.
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* In ''[[Blackadder Goes Forth]]'', Bob Parkhurst [[Sweet Polly Oliver|disguises herself as a man]] because she "want[s] to see how a war is fought so badly." Edmund informs her that she has come to the right place, as [[General Failure|the war is being fought very badly indeed]].
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' has a pretty good one: "[[I Don't Like the Sound of That Place|Demon's Run]] -- When a good man goes to War" versus [[Beware the Nice Ones|"Demons run when a good man goes to war"]]
== [[Music]] ==
* '[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9H_cI_WCnE A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater]'. This early (1950s!) music video makes it clear that the 'correct' interpretation was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying eater of purple people, but it's impossible to tell from the title of the song alone.
* [[Ray Stevens]]' "Little League":
{{quote|''I remember batting practice -- I put a baseball on a string
''And I told this kid, "When I nod my head, haul off and hit that thing!"
''Heh, gotta give him credit; he did ''exactly'' what I said
''Cuz the second that I nodded... HE HIT ME IN THE HEAD! }}
* [["Weird Al"
**
*** [[Take a Third Option|Or did he stuff a rabid wolverine into the underwear that he (Al) was wearing at the time?]]
* Mike Doughty's "Rising Sign" includes the deliberately ambiguous line "I resent the way you make me like myself". "Like" can be read as a verb or a preposition in the context, so it could mean either "I resent that you make me feel good about myself" or "I resent that you make me act in a way characteristic of myself".
* The last verse of [[The Kinks]]' "Lola" ends in "...I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola". This could either mean that the naive narrator never found out that Lola was a man at all ("Lola and I are both glad that I am a man"), or that he ''did'' eventually figure it out and just doesn't mind ("I'm glad that Lola and I are both men").
* In ''[[Vigor Mortis]]'' Lyn says "Isn't she the cutest". Rowan responds "Vita or the dead rat?", Lyn refuses to give him a clear answer and just gives him a grin.
* Another ambiguous headline featuring this trope: "Man Eating Piranha Accidentally Sold as Pet Fish". Actually, probably most ambiguous headlines would qualify, depending on how loosely we define the trope. They're even more vulnerable to it than normal sentences due to omitting lots of grammatical features. The professionals call these [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2407 crash blossoms].▼
** The actual origin is from a headline '''Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms'''<ref>Meaning that a violinist was both linked to the Japan Airlines crash - her father died in it - and has had her career prosper or 'blossom'.</ref>▼
** Also an example of why [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|attention to punctuation]] is important. The headline would not be ambiguous if "man-eating" were hyphenated.▼
** Some other notable crash blossoms are "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms" and "Police Help Dog Bite Victim."▼
** When Ike Turner died, the ''New York Post'' failed to resist the temptation to run the headline [[Domestic Abuse|"Ike Beats Tina to Death."]]▼
* Robert Ripley, an American columnist, once wrote the supposed origin of the phrase "Pardon impossible. To be sent to Siberia", the meaning of which flips if the period is moved to become "Pardon. Impossible to be sent to Siberia".▼
* Newspaper headlines are particularly vulnerable to this due to pressures of space requiring all words that seem superfluous to be removed. Another issue is the (especially British) newspaper tendency to build up absurd compound nouns referring back to previous stories: '''Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison''',<ref>He wasn't buried alive; he was the fiance involved in the 'buried alive' case - that is, he buried ''his'' fiancee alive</ref> '''Sex Quiz Cricket Ace in Hotel Suicide Leap''',<ref>"Sex Quiz Cricket Ace" is the subject - a 'cricket ace' being investigated by police for possible sex crimes - at least until he killed himself by leaping from a hotel balcony</ref> '''Whip rules furore claims first victim'''<ref>The "Whip rules furore" - the controversy caused by new rules on whipping in horse racing - has claimed its first victim - someone resigned.</ref>▼
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
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** Another Dilbert example involved Ratbert having a cat trying to eat his head. Dogbert proposed a solution to Bob the Dinosaur: "I'll yank the cat off Ratbert's head, and you stomp on it." The next panel had Ratbert under Bob's foot and Dogbert saying, "In retrospect, I could have phrased that better."
* There's a comic strip somewhere with a guy charging money to see a "Man Eating Chicken". Surprise, surprise, after the people had paid, they just ended up seeing an ordinary guy on a stage eating fried chicken from a bucket.
== Puzzles ==
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** [[Scrubs|"It's a riddle. Two guys destroyed your bike with a crowbar and a bat. One of them wasn't me."]]
== [[Radio]] ==▼
▲== Radio ==
* This, from an episode of ''[[Hello Cheeky]]''.
{{quote|'''Tim:''' Barry, turn the radio on.
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* ''[[The Goon Show]]'' did a subversion of the old "when I nod my head, hit it" gag in the 1950s.
{{quote|'''Neddie''': There, that did it! ''([[Breaking the Fourth Wall|To audience]])'' Hands up all those who though I was gonna hit him on the nut.}}
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
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RG: Why?
Tester: I win every time I play it. *points to text* See it says 'target player loses next turn'. }}
▲* The card game ''[[Munchkin (game)|Munchkin]]'''s [[Doomy Dooms of Doom|"... Of Doom!"]] card, resulting in "Bow with Ribbons... of Doom!", the question came up whether it was the bow or the ribbons that were 'of doom'.
▲** Then add in to this the "...of my Grandfather" card from ''Munchkin Fu'' and you can have such gems as the "Big Black .45... of Doom... of my Grandfather" which leads one to think that the gun killed the grand father.
▲== [[Theater]] ==
* Groucho Marx's famous line "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know."
** And his "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
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'''Rosencrantz:''' Ah. }}
* In the play ''A Village Fable'', it's unclear whether the notorious Six-Fingered Man has three fingers on each hand or a total of 12.
== [[Video Games]] ==
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* No-one's entirely sure whether [[Portal (series)|GLaDOS]] is a Genetic Lifeform who is also a Disk Operating System, or whether she is a System for Operating Genetic Lifeforms and Disks.
** Judging by the sequel, {{spoiler|[[Brain Uploading|it's the former.]]}}
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Dinosaur Comics]]'': T-Rex riffs on a classic example (known as a [[wikipedia:Garden path sentence|garden-path sentence]]): "[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=204 The horse raced past the barn fell]".
* ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' uses a similar garden-path sentence early on in its first arc: "When the goat turns red strikes true."
* Used cunningly in [https://web.archive.org/web/20130510102945/http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/5372-Stolen-Pixels-29-The-Letter-Home this] ''[[Stolen Pixels]]'', lampooning [[Tabula Rasa]]:
{{quote|"''Anyway, hope you and little Jim are well. Send some chocolate or some pornography! The Forean stuff we have here just isn't doing it for us.''"}}
* The title of ''[[Demon Eater]]'' is another "both" example: Saturno is a demon who eats, and an eater of demons.
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* ''Pain Train'': "[http://paintraincomic.com/comic/the-terrible-buffet/ All You Can Eat, Buffet]" does ''not'' [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|have the comma misplaced]].
== [[Web Original]] ==
* All The Tropes (and [[TV Tropes]]
** An example rightly documented in [[TV Tropes/Funny|TV Tropes]]:
{{quote|From the ''[[Peanuts]]'' [[Just Bugs Me]] page:
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Is it bad that I read the start of this entry as a list of 4 names, rather than an expletive and 3 names?
Jesus is laughing at Charlie Brown for having a great Christmas spirit! The irony!
Nope. I did it, too. As did my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
Your parents are Ayn Rand and God?}}
* The [[SCP Foundation]] has a "Six-Foot-Tall Man Eating Chicken." The SCP object is described as follows: "SCP-3467 is a six (6) foot tall, two hundred (200) pound man eating chicken. Subject is thirty five (35), slightly balding, dark brown hair and eyes, and slightly overweight. Name is Hank __________, and he has worked as a Level 1 cleanup crew for the past three years. Hank is never seen without a bucket of chicken, and only stops eating it when actually working, which is a rare occurrence in itself."
** Which is in turn a reference to ''[[The Little Rascals]]''.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[The Tick (animation)|The Tick]]'' episode in Europe, Tick encounters the two Fortissimo Brothers, who, he is told, have the strength of 10 men. He then asks, "Is that five men each or 20 all together?"
* A sketch in ''[[Sheep in The Big City]]'' featured two daredevils attempting to perform a stunt with the '''man eating cheese'''. No, the cheese doesn't eat people, it was just a man... eating cheese.
* An episode of ''[[Count Duckula]]'' has a joke involving the [[Dumb Muscle]] being given the instruction: "See this lever here? When I nod my head, I want you to hit it as hard as you can."
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* A vintage ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short, "The Ducksters" has Daffy Duck as the host of a quiz show, "Brought to you by the Eagle Hand Laundry. Are your eagle's hands dirty?"
== [[Real Life]] ==▼
▲== Real Life ==
* Every trial attorney is taught the dangers of poorly chosen syntax with some variant of the following riposte by a cagey witness.
{{quote|'''Atty''': Mr. Smith, did you or did you not clandestinely meet with Miss Peters on that evening?
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** Hence the [[Light Bulb Joke]] about Lojban speakers: "One to figure out what to change it to and one to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light."
* While in languages like Swedish, composite words are very valuable. "Mörkhårig sjukgymnast" translates to dark-haired physiotherapist, while a "Mörk hårig sjuk gymnast" is a dark, hairy, sick gymnast.
** Just as some of the hyphen-lacking examples mentioned, the syntax actually ''is'' non-
* Introductory linguistics classes sometimes have homework assignments that involve analyzing the possible meanings of such phrases.
* 1327, Earl Mortimer wanted to kill King Edward II, but did not want to leave incriminating evidence. Assassins demanded a written warrant. Mortimer wrote "Nolite Edwardum occidere timere bonum est." which depends on the comma: "Nolite Edwardum occidere ''',''' timere bonum est." = "Don't KILL Edward. It is good to fear." "Nolite Edwardum occidere timere ''',''' bonum est." = "Don't be AFRAID of killing Edward. All is well."
* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] by two phrases commonly spread around to encourage proper comma usage:<ref>that would normally have tone difference to clarify</ref>
* Another one that crops up in syntactical studies: I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
* Another good one - [[
* " A Woman without her man is useless." Is it "A woman: without her, man is useless" or is it " a woman, without her man, is useless"?
* '"I see," said the blind man.' Is he saying he understands, or that he is possessed of the sense of sight? If the latter, then he is a liar. A variation on the joke that continues in the same vein goes '"I see," said the blind man, as he picked up the hammer and saw.'
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{{quote|It's the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.}}
* A sign at a Souplantation (a all-you-can-eat, buffet-style restaurant in some areas of the U.S.) reads "Please eat all food on premises."
* A popular image on the internet is of a
** To clarify, "Fuckin a man" implies gay sex. "Fuckin a, man", which is what he meant, is angry sarcasm, the "A" being short for "Awesome".
▲* Another ambiguous headline featuring this trope: "Man Eating Piranha Accidentally Sold as Pet Fish". Actually, probably most ambiguous headlines would qualify, depending on how loosely we define the trope. They're even more vulnerable to it than normal sentences due to omitting lots of grammatical features. The professionals call these [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2407 crash blossoms].
▲** The actual origin is from a headline '''Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms'''<ref>Meaning that a violinist was both linked to the Japan Airlines crash - her father died in it - and has had her career prosper or 'blossom'.</ref>
▲** Also an example of why [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|attention to punctuation]] is important. The headline would not be ambiguous if "man-eating" were hyphenated.
▲** Some other notable crash blossoms are "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms" and "Police Help Dog Bite Victim."
▲** When Ike Turner died, the ''New York Post'' failed to resist the temptation to run the headline [[Domestic Abuse|"Ike Beats Tina to Death."]]
▲* Robert Ripley, an American columnist, once wrote the supposed origin of the phrase "Pardon impossible. To be sent to Siberia", the meaning of which flips if the period is moved to become "Pardon. Impossible to be sent to Siberia".
▲* Newspaper headlines are particularly vulnerable to this due to pressures of space requiring all words that seem superfluous to be removed. Another issue is the (especially British) newspaper tendency to build up absurd compound nouns referring back to previous stories: '''Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison''',<ref>He wasn't buried alive; he was the fiance involved in the 'buried alive' case - that is, he buried ''his'' fiancee alive</ref> '''Sex Quiz Cricket Ace in Hotel Suicide Leap''',<ref>"Sex Quiz Cricket Ace" is the subject - a 'cricket ace' being investigated by police for possible sex crimes - at least until he killed himself by leaping from a hotel balcony</ref> '''Whip rules furore claims first victim'''<ref>The "Whip rules furore" - the controversy caused by new rules on whipping in horse racing - has claimed its first victim - someone resigned.</ref>
* One example of a hypothetical award-acceptance speech that's designed to promote the use of the [[w:Oxford comma|Oxford comma]]: "I'd like to thank my parents, God, and L. Ron Hubbard" vs. "I'd like to thank my parents, God and L. Ron Hubbard"
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Double Meaning Tropes]]
[[Category:This Might Be an Index]]
[[Category:Language Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Ambiguous Syntax]]
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