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Seven Missteps on the Road to Ambiguity

By Roy Clark

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Poet and scholar William Empson was only 24 years old in 1930 when he wrote the book "Seven Types of Ambiguity," which is why I hate him, not for the influence of his scholarship, but that so wise a study of literature should come from a so young a writer. (On the flip side, I admire Empson for his roguish personal life: He was banished from Cambridge University after a housekeeper found condoms in his room.)

Ambiguity, it seems, has great value in certain discourse communities. In diplomacy, ambiguity enables compromise by inviting each side to interpret language for partisan benefit. In the famous legal decision Brown vs. Board of Education, an oxymoron -- "with all deliberate speed" -- set the clock ticking in the hope that enlightened leaders would have the time needed for the peaceful desegregation of public schools. Opponents used the phrase to justify resistance.

In the experience of literature, ambiguity reflects a multi-layered world, allowing the reader to hold on to multiple meanings at the same time. To quote Empson directly, he defines ambiguity as "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." As an example, Empson offers Shakespeares Sonnet 73, in which an aging poet encourages his younger lover to love the older man with passion while there is still time. It begins:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In the closest of close readings, Empson explores the levels of meaning generated by "bare ruined choirs." In short, he asks, "how is an aging lover like a tree in autumn like the ruins of a monastery?"

Heres Empson:

The fundamental situation is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. [In the case of] "bare ruined choirs," [the comparisons make sense at a variety of levels]: "because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeares feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of Puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machination of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

Such rich and detailed interpretation reveals the creative uses of ambiguity. For less skilled and experienced writers, however, ambiguity may not be a prize at all, or even an intended effect of the prose. At their worst, unintended multiple meanings creep into texts, even shorts ones, often producing disastrous or hilarious results. Consider these actual headlines, gathered over the years by the Columbia Journalism Review:

Starving Angolans
eating dogs, bark

Disney keeps
touching kids

Lay position proposed
by bishop for women

Change Found in Subways: Panhandling Is Down

Gas levels
high in
Beantown

Torch relay runner dies after his leg

Cubans march
Over 6-year-old

Prostate cancer more common in men

So in place of Empsons seven types of literary ambiguity, I am constructing seven common ways in which writers stumble into unintended double meanings.

1. Failure to account for homonyms: Homonyms are two words that sound the same and are spelled the same, but have different meanings. That helps create the laughable confusion of : "Starving Angolans eating dogs, bark." In their desperation, the starving people are eating domestic animals and the bark off of trees. That latter meaning of bark derives from the Old English, but a different meaning -- to voice a sharp sound -- comes from Old Norse.

2. Confusion of parts of speech: Using the same example, we see that though the writer intended to use "bark" as a noun, its ludicrous meaning derives from a verb form.

3. Contamination of meaning by juxtaposed words: "It is almost impossible to see the word "bark" next to the word "dogs" without imagining Lassie trying to save Timmy from falling into the well. The headline about "gas" would seem sophomoric or scatological if not for its association with the nickname for Boston, Beantown.

4. Colliding denotations and connotations: as in "Disney keeps touching kids." Disney, of course, is the name of a famous cartoonist and entrepreneur, but also the name of several places, including "Disney World." The word touch, in a neutral sense, means to make contact with the hand, but here it carries conflicting connotations: a warm feeling in the heart and an inappropriate or illegal sexual contact of a child by an adult.

5. Preposition mischief: Added to a verb, a simple preposition can transform effect and meaning. It is the ambiguity in the preposition "over" that makes us smile when we read: "Cubans march over 6-year-old boy." The writer uses "over" as a synonym for "concerning," not recognizing that "march over" could be mistaken for "trample."

6. The tremors of redundancy: I have a special fondness for the headline: "Prostate cancer more common in men." The female equivalent, I suppose is "Ovarian cancer more common in women." Since a man lacks ovaries and a woman doesnt need a prostate to tell if shes coming or going, it is redundant to add the phrases "in men" and "in women." Including them creates the humor.

7. The challenge of abstraction: On rare occasions, the same word can be confused as either abstract or concrete. "Change" is one of them. It can refer to the jingle jangle in your pocket or alms dropped in a tin cup. Or it can be used to challenge the status quo in a political campaign. "Change found in subways: Panhandling is down" is so bad, its good. Next to the word "found," the word "change" feels like metal money, an impression reinforced by "panhandling." Sadly, the writer means the word as an abstraction: Something like "Things look different in the subways. Fewer people are begging for money."

Bonus misstep toward ambiguity: Failure to account for semantic change: Words change and then they change some more. If I invoke a cliché used innocently a century ago, "A gay time was had by all," my intent may be frustrated by visions of San Francisco or Key West. Semantic change turns "lay position" -- meaning a clerical position -- into a sexual double entendre.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).