Another Antecedent Problem

Here Dagwood offers his boss two antecedents to reply to. He spells them out in the second panel:

(Short versions: “promise,” or “get mad.”)

I see this pop up occasionally in conversations. And it’s not infrequently a source of conversational humor.

But when you write expositorily, try to avoid this ambiguity!

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I always thought this kind of self-contradictory statement was a consequence of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (qv), but here I see it attributed to Bertrand Russell.

This is philosophically (or mathematically) equivalent to the statement “This sentence is false.” Gödel definitely warned that things that refer to themselves can get you into trouble.

This error is close to me because of my proximity to chickens. If you have chickens, you know not to do this, right? Bottom right.

It’s like saying a baby infant.

I’ve mentioned this topic before. Use the search box to find more.

Don’t use pronouns if you can help it because you might face antecedent confusion. Like this funny:

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know I preach against redundancy, aka unnecessary repetition. Such as “do it over again.” (Either “over” or “again,” but not both.) We call this being concise.

Well, maybe I just ran into a case where the redundancy is necessary!

After all, just “drink” all by itself implies drinking booze, right?