Amphiboly

52 Amphiboly

Roberto Ruiz

Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their […] their love with women all across the country.

George W. Bush

Amphiboly is a fallacy involving syntax: the way words and phrases fit together. A misplaced modifier or an unclear pronoun can give a sentence more than one reading. The ambiguity becomes a problem for an argument when a conclusion depends on switching between those readings, or on accepting a reading the speaker did not intend. It can also be very funny.

Consider the following newspaper headline: “Condom truck tips, spills load.” The reason you’re laughing – or at least snickering – is that this headline can be interpreted in at least two different ways, depending on what the phrase “spills load” refers to: if it refers to the contents of the truck, then it just means that there are condoms all over the place, but if it refers to the contents of the condoms, then, well …. This joke depends largely on the different senses of “spills load” and on what is understood to be spilling. It illustrates double meaning, though the ambiguity is not purely a matter of syntax.

More formally speaking, the fallacy of amphiboly occurs when the meaning of a phrase or sentence is indeterminate or ambiguous, particularly as a result of poor syntax, and especially when further inferences are drawn based on the acceptance of an unintended meaning of such passages.

The ambiguities found in cases of amphiboly usually arise from mistakes in grammar (a dangling modifier, an ambiguous antecedent preceding a pronoun, awkward combinations of adverbs and adjectives, inconsistencies in subject‐verb agreement, ambiguous referents, etc.) but also from various forms of linguistic booby traps: from loose or awkward phrasing, from compound phrases that have different meanings depending on whether their parts are being used individually or collectively, from the use of careless arrangements of words, from the ambiguity between the narrow and broad scope of certain phrases, and from inferences drawn based on the difference between what one party means by some utterance and how another party interprets it.

Comedians exploit ambiguous phrasing, along with other kinds of wordplay. Groucho Marx, who quipped that “humor is reason gone mad,” made a career of jokes like these. Some turn on syntax; others use contradiction or a sudden change in meaning:

• Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
• Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.
• I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.
• I intend to live forever, or die trying.
• One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.

Ambiguous phrasing can also have serious consequences. The interpretation of carelessly constructed legal contracts and wills, for instance, has been known to produce unnecessary and painful conflicts. Consider the following example: Since Mr. Moneypants stated in his will: “I leave my fortune of half a billion dollars and my pet poodle to Rich and Doug,” the court concludes that Rich gets the fortune and Doug gets the poodle. Because Mr. Moneypants did not specify whether the conjunction should be interpreted as including the word respectively or collectively, it is quite possible that his actual intentions will not be honored and that a regrettable feud will develop between his heirs.

Instructions and explanations for children need particular care: a reader may reasonably attach a phrase to the wrong part of a sentence. The Wikiquote entry on the popular children’s book Charlotte’s Web, for instance, claims that the book is “about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.” Because of the dangling modifier, the phrasing in this description makes it sound as though Charlotte – contrary to fact – is Wilbur’s would‐be slaughterer.

Amphibolies can also have the potential to either threaten political careers or make them indefinitely memorable. In a speech about the “War on Terror,” for instance, former President George W. Bush once said: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we” (White House Archives [2004]). Of course, when he then went on to make other amphibolous remarks, such as: “There’s an enemy that would like to attack America […] again. There just is. That’s the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best […]” or “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda” (Weisberg [2000], [2009]), it’s a bit hard not to sympathize to some extent with his more conspiracy‐theory‐inclined critics.

But perhaps it’s somewhat premature to jump to cynical and conspiratorial conclusions when we consider other amphibolies and head‐scratchers made by President Bush over the course of his political career: “I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office,” “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully,” “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace,” or “They misunderestimated me” (Weisberg [2000], [2009]). This ability to be beaten into submission and dizzying confusion by his own words might help to confirm to the rest of his critics that the time the President almost choked to death on a pretzel was probably no accident.

Various real‐life stories, ranging from the mundane and comedic to the tragic, have been immortalized by newspaper headlines that, intentionally and unintentionally, have capitalized on the ambiguities created by amphibolies:

Headless Body in Topless Bar

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Blind Bishop Appointed to See

Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police

Deaf Mute Gets New Hearing in Killing

Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax

Man Shoots Neighbor with Machete

Bullying Session to Be Rescheduled

March Planned for Next August

Lack of Brains Hinders Research

Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons

Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case

Miners Refuse to Work After Death

Killer Sentenced to Die for 2nd Time in 10 Years

Finally, there are probably no more satisfying cases of amphiboly than those in which there is a dose of poetic justice: when the double meaning of an utterance ends up unwittingly reinforcing an institution’s mission statement, as in the following example found outside of a health clinic:

Family Planning Advice

Use Rear Entrance

The clinic’s directions have accidentally doubled as a bawdy joke.