I hate to bitch but bitch I must

RW rwmaillists at googlemail.com
Sun Oct 18 04:32:18 UTC 2009


On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:49:52 -0400
Bob Hall <rjhjr0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 02:34:40AM +0000, Mark wrote:
> > Actually, this has got very little to do with being a native English
> > speaker or not. It's ere a matter of intonation (which, in writing,
> > can only be conveyed to a certain degree, of course). 'Should' can
> > certainly mean "Don't try that." As in:
> > 
> > Will the ice hold me?
> > Well, technically it should.
> > 
> > (Meaning: it probably will, but I'm not overly confident.)
> 
> Actually, what's happening here is dropping part of a sentence. It's
> common in English to shorten
> 	Yea, it should work, but it doesn't.

Not really, but the only sensible meaning is that it should, in an
ideal world, work.

It seems that people are grasping for ambiguity here. If a phrase has
one sensible meaning and other absurd meanings then there really is
no ambiguity all unless one is trying to be deliberately obtuse.






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