Tangential thought: this poll, and the response “the mountain” recalls the old tradition of scribbling “dang” or another cryptic abbreviation into student papers—without teaching what modifiers are, how one can use them, when they cause confusion, and what “dang” stands for.
You could say that “dang” is not dissimilar to recent comments of “2+2=4, you just don’t get it, do you?” or “2+2=4, or what are you, stupid?!”
No, actually, we’re here to discuss interesting things about math with examples that look wrong and are therefore interesting puzzles.
As a language and writing teacher, I do the same with sentences that are bad. Look at this, it sounds confusing, let me tell you something about sentence structure that allows you to see why that might be!
Understanding how modifiers work from a linguistic perspective is fascinating. Finding “dang” in the margin of your paper less so.
Or, I’ve just made similar points as I made in this piece about recent math discussion, but now about language and linguistics.
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