I went to a certain military training school with some linguists, and they told me they had face-to-face proficiency tests like quarterly.
The tests would start with normal benign conversational topics, like one would expect, but then escalate to weirdness from there.
Things like “Are you more worried about the recent nuclear-waste-being-found-in-kayaks issue, or the ongoing chihuahuas-shitting-out-whole-uncured-meat-products problem?”. The point was to see if the linguist could piece together information from non-standard esoteric shit.
Those 615 giraffes look like they’d fit right into such a test.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 9 months ago
The lack of the word “and” in the number there made this parse really weirdly in my brain.
Instead of “I play with 615 giraffes”, I read it as “I play with 600 15-giraffes”. I don’t know what a 15-giraffe is, but it sounds like it might be an unstable isotope or something.
criitz@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Thanks for spelling out why this felt wrong to me
Zagorath@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Yeah, as far as I can tell it’s normal in America to say 615 as “six hundred fifteen”, whereas the rest of the anglosphere would say “six hundred and fifteen”.
The fact that the line break happened to be right where the word “and” was missing probably made it even harder to parse correctly.