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Saturday, August 14, 2010

Boy chases away man who shot his dad with kitchen knife

From Quinion:

"The headline on the website of The Daily Caller of Miami - noted by
Susie Elins on Monday - seems to imply a multifunction weapon: "Boy
chases away man who shot his dad with kitchen knife.""
Posted by at

5 comments:

  1. Lawrence J. KramerAugust 16, 2010 at 8:16 PM

    A very similar event has been immortalized in poem:

    One bright day in the middle of the night
    Two dead boys got up to fight.
    One was deaf and the other couldn't see.
    And the Devil was the referee.

    Back to back they faced each other,
    Drew their swords and shot each other.
    A deaf policeman heard the noise,
    And came and killed those two dead boys.

    There are many versions of this doggerel on the web; the one above is how I remember it from childhood.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Luigi SperanzaAugust 16, 2010 at 8:38 PM

    "Drew their swords and shot each other."

    Beautiful. In a way, I copied the Quinion without much working on the implicature, but the fact that Susie used 'imply' had a certain appeal with me.

    "shot with kitchen knife". Usually Quinion respects the wording of the correspondent. So the idea of a multifunctional weapon must be Susie's.

    Strictly, the utterance may not be standardly false. To 'shoot' is to throw. So, surely it IS plausible (or implausible, but still possible) that the man did throw a kitchen knife to the boy's father -- therefore killing him.

    In a way, the more standard, "killed his man with kitchen knife" does not quite carry the idea -- that the 'utterer' was aiming at.

    It's like one wants to know the 'morbid' details if that's the word.

    Or not.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Luigi SperanzaAugust 16, 2010 at 8:40 PM

    Oops. You see how silly I can be. Apparently, the meaning is:

    Boy chases away, with kitchen knife, a man who shot his (dead) dad.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Luigi SperanzaAugust 16, 2010 at 8:43 PM

    On top of cancelled implicatures, the dead man was not dead.

    "A Broward dad is lucky to be alive after he was shot during a botched robbery attempt. And he has his 9-year-old son to thank for it.

    Police are searching for a suspect who shot Rodney Shepard in front of his three sons Monday evening in Plantation. The shooting happened shortly before 5 p.m. Monday at the home on the 4500 block of Northwest 3rd Court.

    According to police,Shepard and his three boys, 8-year-old twins and a 9-year-old son, were confronted by a family acquaintance outside the house.

    As they talked to the acquaintance, known as "Dred" or "Dred O," a Mercedes pulled into the driveway and a man with a handgun jumped out of the car and approached them.

    The gunman ordered Shepard into his house and began to search his pockets for valuables.

    Shepard and the gunman began to struggle, and Shepard wound up shot in the leg. The 9-year-old got a kitchen knife in attempt to ward off the gunman, who fled the scene.

    Dred also fled the scene."

    ---- Strange. I wouldn't use 'shoot' to 'shot and yet the victim survived'. It's like that play by Ibsen. The actor is supposed to say, "He shot himself". It came out as "He shat himself".

    In a way it's like the usual,

    "Three sailors killed in a storm".

    I would NEVER use 'kill' for something that sailors usually get done -- 'killed' by a storm.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lawrence J. KramerAugust 16, 2010 at 9:01 PM

    I feel bad for the kid. He's going to go through life thinking it's sufficient to bring a knife to a gunfight. That may not end well.

    ReplyDelete

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