| HN Mirror

Oh, man, taking a win when the opponent concedes ground is no fun at all, right?

> So you are in fact claiming you were joking?

Never claimed so. The first message was making fun of the title (which should be obvious even to those struggling with nuance comprehension). It's, BTW, not exactly the same thing as joking. Everything posted further was pretty serious.

> instead of arguing about English

"Arguing about English" paints my part in the discussion in an overly aggressive light. I was mostly answering direct questions and disproving points that were aimed at me or my arguments.

> For multiple messages in a row, there’s no indication you were making fun.

It wasn't the theme of the discussion, reread it and look at what we were actually talking about. If you didn't parse my original message as playful, then, surely, the the fault is mine. I'll work on my eloquence. But I'd rather make a poor attempt at humour and let it fail than keep on repeating "this wasn't serious!" in every subsequent message.

> Because transplants for autism isn’t ambiguous to native speakers

Firstly, this is overgeneralization that you can't possibly posit as a fact, unless you're a linguist that happens to have the stats on hand.

Secondly, the crowd here is rather diverse, and I bet non-natives are not a negligible minority. At least for some of them the awkwardness of the condensed form chosen for the title is pretty obvious, as it was for me.

The bottom line here is the comprehension (including native) is never deterministic, but is context-driven. Temporary alternative parses (even if it converges to a specific interpretation with later context) is an established phenomenon which, to my taste, is a great source of fun. Though I admit this wasn't nearly my best attempt.

> I didn’t mean to be condescending

Then I don't believe you've succeeded. The problem is that you're arguing against a stronger claim than I’m making, whilst being just a bit too assertive, degrading the debate to lifestyle advice, etc.

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Regarding your multilingual examples, you're most likely not native to a Romance language, because you're missing the distinction between, for example, "por" and "para" which do not translate directly to English "for", so your examples aren't as effective as you probably hoped. "Ir al medico por dolor" translates better to "to go to the doctor because of pain", not "for pain". Same with "wegen", it's literally "because of", not "for".

> I only meant to contradict your apparent insistence that ‘transplants for autism’ is easily misunderstood, because it’s not.

Never said "easily". However, you seem to be adamant on dismissing the two main points I repeatedly tried to get across and which are the reason I made fun of the title in the first place:

1. "Transplant" is a procedure or the result of thereof, it does not lexically encode remediation to the same extent "treatment" or "medication" do. You can transplant a third arm to a human, this won't be considering a health-improving procedure. To rephrase, "transplant" is not inherently therapeutic but is always an intrusive procedure.

2. Again, not everyone conceptualizes an "Autism" of an unknown severity as a condition in need of a treatment involving body-intrusive procedures!

These two facts make the "X for Z" not reliably triggering the "ibuprofen for headache" reading. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen for you so you just dismiss this fact and keep on pushing, instead of admitting there can be ambiguity. You'll surely agree, that it's the medicalized context doing the disambiguation for the concise form, not the syntax itself!

Consider a parallel linguistic construct: "implant for mind control". Would you still argue it's unambiguously "for countering mind control"?