Having survived the surgical removal of my wisdom teeth, I remembered to email Dr Ruth Wajnryb, Spectrum's 'Words' columnist about an interesting linguist question that has been bothering me for some weeks:
Recently I had to go into day surgery to have my wisdom teeth removed. A day before the scheduled surgery a nurse called to ask a few questions: 'Do you have diabetes?' 'Do you smoke?' etc. Her last question was 'You haven't had a cold or cough in the past week?' Instinctively I said 'yes', which I then had to explain as 'yes, I haven't had a cold or cough'.
What is the correct interpretation of the negative question? If she had asked 'Have you had a cold or cough in the past week?' I would have answered 'no', so surely asking a negative version of that question should also reverse the answer.
I received the following reply today:
Thank u for ur email. Interesting question. First let me ask u if you're a speaker of an Asian language, because this is a point of grammar that often trips up such a speaker and my reply would be different then compared to if u'd been a native speaker of English. Ruth
Seriously, is this columnist really a linguist? I'm not sure if this is some kind of post-modernist response incorporating SMS language or just a truly bad email.
The first thing that threw me was the use of the 'u' instead of 'you' and yet she's typed out 'you're' in full. The second thing that threw me was the use of 'then' instead of 'than' for the comparative.
I feel three things at the moment:
1) The subs must do a good job with her column;
2) The literate world as we know it is about to end;
3) Maybe this is joke she plays on people to see if they correct her.
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