Optional garbage disposal & affordable children

My ideal world, in other words

Friends with Words is a newsletter about language, culture, and identity, created by a Russian-born, Israel-based writer, linguist, and single mom.

It's for people who believe that curiosity can heal the world or, at least, make it a slightly less horrible place.

The other night, as I was taking out the trash, a woman passing by warned me: “Be careful, there are snakes here at this time of year.”

I know it’s snake season, but I’ve never heard of snakes in garbage bins. It was a bit worrying, but I guess all I could do was be careful about opening the lid from now on.

“One time,” the woman continued, “a snake jumped at me right from the garbage bin. After that, I don’t take out the garbage anymore.”

I thanked her for her warning, and we went our separate ways.

But I couldn’t get that last sentence out of my head. I tried to imagine her house after her unfortunate encounter with the snake. WHERE DOES SHE KEEP ALL THE GARBAGE ??

And then it hit me. All she meant was that she doesn’t take out the trash anymore, but that someone else in her house does it instead.

I didn’t get that because in my world, if I don’t take out the trash, the trash will not be taken out.

Things left unsaid

The thing is, in order to communicate with each other, it’s not enough for us to know the meaning of words and understand how to stack them together to form sentences.

We always rely on background knowledge (knowledge about how the world works, assumptions about other people’s intentions, cultural knowledge, and our personal contexts) when interpreting things other people say.

Now, let’s get technical for a bit, because it’s fun.

The branch of linguistics that deals with how utterances are interpreted in context is called pragmatics, and the specific phenomenon that is responsible for the garbage disposal misunderstanding I just described is known as implicature.

Implicature is something that we infer from an utterance, even though it is not expressed literally.

When the woman said, “I do not take out the garbage anymore”, my chain of implicatures went like this:

A. Garbage disposal is not optional (common knowledge about how the world works that I assume that woman and I shared)

B. She is the only person in her house capable of taking out the garbage (because everybody is like me 🙄)

C. If she doesn’t take out the garbage, the garbage doesn’t get taken out

Now you can see why I was confused: because C conflicted with one of the foundational beliefs on which our civilization stands (A).

Other things you can(not) stop doing

But if you say, for example, I don’t brush my teeth anymore, we know that your teeth aren’t being brushed, for sure. We also know that that cannot possibly be good for you.

It comes from our knowledge about how the world works, as encoded in the following implicatures:

A. Brushing one’s teeth is not optional

B. Everyone is responsible for brushing their own teeth

C. The speaker suffers from severe dental problems or will soon

ChatGPT seems to share my intuition in this regard:

Of course, we can imagine an alternative universe where we have robots that brush our teeth for us (perhaps not too far-fetched). The thing about implicatures is that they’re based on likelihood, but they can always be cancelled when the speaker provides additional information.

Affordable children (finally!)

My teenager sent this to me last summer when he visited his father in the UK.

“I bought four kids for a quid” is immediately funny and / or uninterpretable because the implicature “You can buy four children for a pound at a train station” is so ridiculous, based on what we know about the world, that it cannot possibly be true.

I say it’s a good thing that we live in a world where kids can’t be bought in a vending machine at a train station. Imagine the outrage on social media about how the Ministry of Transportation is forcing women into (grand)motherhood by selling them heavily discounted offspring.

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