I recently received an email from a current grad student in the program to which I'll be attending in the fall. She congratulated me and such, then ended the email by offering advice or help with anything I needed, as well as to tell me what the professors are really like. This emphasis of really really made me wonder: are you trying to tell me that you didn't give me a good impression of them when I was on the campus looking at the department?
I feel like this is said a lot around university campuses. It seems to me here that the speaker is letting you know in a nice way that they flout the quality and manner maxims for the sake of being polite in order to ease you into the program/new professors.
I find this to generally come as a surprise when someone says it, and wonder why the reality was not stated in the first place.
While planning a trip to Indianapolis to visit a friend next weekend, he sent an email saying that I should arrive late afternoon, about 1:00.
I am rather curious as to when 1:00 became late afternoon? Just as The weekend has taken up Friday for some people, so has late afternoon snatched up early afternoon it appears.
I noticed that the Beetles song I am the Walrus begins with a really good example of personal deixis gone awry!
- I am he is you are he is you are me and we are all together.
If one were to try and follow this train of thought through to an actual conversation, no one would ever be able to tell who was refering to whom. I think that this goes to show us that drugs and pragmatics clearly do not mix.
So, I was watching an episode of Arrested Development today, and this dialogue came up that I couldn't pass by for a blog post.
The situation: the mother is seducing the warden of the prison, and the son with whom she is talking can't accept the fact that she would do such a thing.
Mother- I'm trying to seduce him!
Son - Who's the I in that sentence?
Mother - Me!
I found it rather funny that his own inability to view her as doing that inabled him to understand that the I was the speaker, as it normally is.
