Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

* Ambiguity comes in two forms, lexical and syntactic. Lexical ambiguity is about the meanings of individual words; I tell you to go have a ball, and you don't know whether I mean a good time, an elaborate party, or an object for playing tennis. Syntactic (or grammatical) ambiguity, in contrast, is about sentences like Put the block on the box in the table, that have structures which could be interpreted in more than one way. Classic sentences like Time flies like an arrow are ambiguous in both ways; without further context, flies could be a noun or a verb, like a verb or a comparative, and so forth.

tin a perfect language, in an organism with properly implemented trees, this sort of inadvertent ambiguity wouldn't be a problem; instead we'd have the option of using what mathematicians use: parentheses, which are basically symbols that tell us how to group things. (2 X 3) + 2 = 8, while 2 X (3 + 2) = 10. We'd be able to easily articulate the difference between (Angela shot the man) with the gun and Angela shot (the man with the gun). As handy as parentheses would be, they, too, are missing in action because the species-wide lack of postal code memory.

Indeed, a certain part of the work that professional writers must do (especially if they write nonfiction) is compensate for language's limitations, to scan carefully to make sure that there's no vague he that could refer to either the farmer or his son, no misplaced commas, no dangling (or squinting) modifiers, and so forth. In Robert Louis Stevenson's words, "The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean." Of course, sometimes ambiguity is deliberate, but that's a separate story; it's one thing to leave a reader with a vivid sense of a difficult decision, another to accidentally leave a reader confused.

Put together all these factors — inadvertent ambiguity, idiosyncratic memory, snap judgments, arbitrary associations, and a choreography that strains our internal clocks — and what emerges? Vagueness, idiosyncrasy, and a language that is frequently vulnerable to misinterpretation — not to mention a vocal apparatus more byzantine than a bagpipe made up entirely of pipe cleaners and cardboard dowels. In the words of the linguist Geoff Pullum, "The English language is, in so many ways, a flawed masterpiece of evolution, loaded with rough bits, silly design oversights, ragged edges, stupid gaps, and malign and perverted irregularities."

As the psycholinguist Fernanda Ferreira has put it, language is "good enough," not perfect. Most of the time we get things right, but sometimes we are easily confused. Or even misled. Few people, for example, scarcely notice that something's amiss when you ask them, "How many animals did Moses bring onto the ark?"* Even fewer realize that a sentence like More people have been to Russia than I have is either (depending on your point of view) ungrammatical or incoherent.

If language were designed by an intelligent engineer, interpreters would be out of a job, and Berlitz's language schools would be drive

*People hear the words animals and ark, and fail to notice that the question is about Moses rather than Noah.