Saturday, December 13, 2008

Bizarre Language Conventions

Over at TPM, there's a link on the right panel to a Chicago Sun-Times article entitled "Blago Could Decide Future By Monday." The link itself says "Report: Blago Could Decide Plans Monday."

I often make use of the "may or may not" linguistic construction myself, and I'm aware that things like "could decide" or "may or may not be" indicate that a possibility of something exists, where the default assumption would be that its not there. However, its still the case that saying "Blago Could Decide Future By Monday" is to say that Blagojevich could, theoretically, decide to resign, and that Monday is a day in the future.

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