I've seen those English dramas too, they're cruel

[venta]

I avoided all the BBC frothing about bad grammar the other day. Much as I like a well-placed apostrophe, the sort of people who say "I think you'll find you mean 'fewer'" are, largely, arses (up with whom one should not put).

However, a nice grammar quiz? oh yes, that sounds like fun. I can answer it and feel all smug. Except, of course, I disagreed with it.

Question 3: Read this sentence carefully. "I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary." Which of the following is correct?

1. Hilary is male
2. Hilary is female
3. It's impossible to know from the context

Now, the BBC's answer is that Hilary is male, because there isn't a comma after 'brother'. Benedict is described as "my brother who doesn't [live in Madrid]", so there must also be another brother, and thus that brother must be only-other-sibling Hilary.

I claim the answer is morally 3: it's impossible to tell. Because I, for one, got so lost among the commas of that god-awful sentence that I was frankly quite bewildered enough by the end without worrying about whether Hilary was a boy or a girl. Good grammar aids clarity, it doesn't reduce English to a puzzle of whether you knew the rules well enough to divine the writer's intent correctly. If your reader has to count commas to understand your statement, you've already got it monumentally wrong.

Bah.

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

If they're going to be all "let me infer the gender of a person who is standing right in front of me from grammatical pedantry instead of talking to them" then surely that comma is only important if Hilary is the brother who *does* live in Madrid? Otherwise Benedict being a brother who doesn't is entirely irrelevant.

Anyway if somebody's going to call their children Clara, Benedict and Hilary they are either a Tory minister or a character in a Victorian novel, in which case Hilary is probably male.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering about the motivations of the speaker, who seems determined not only to stretch their interlocutor's comma-counting skills to the full, but also to probably rather embarrass poor Hilary.

There must be a reason why they introduce them as sibling rather than as brother or sister. Maybe they aren't sure themselves.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is the sort of horribly contrived sentence which only exists to pop up in grammar questions. I feel sorry for Benedict, too, as it seems the most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't live in Madrid.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I assume we're looking at a transcript of logs from a house bugged by MI5 or somesuch, rather than being directly involved. The transcriber was meticulously accurate but has since been blown up by enemy agents, so we can't just ask her, and only this fragment of the transcript survives, so there's no context to tell us whether it's a male or female Hilary we're after.
Hilary is probably a big strapping beardy bloke whose gender nobody present would doubt, and the speaker wished to clarify that the family gathering was complete.

[chrisvenus]

This.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, you wouldn't be able to do the grammatical pedantry if you were actually being introduced, because you can't hear commas :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

... except in highly specialised circumstances (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA).