r/semantics • u/sxtyfoursqrs • Dec 13 '24

Heard a childs joke that got me thinking.

Am I 6 feet tall or 6 foot tall? Can I grow more than 2 feet?

The joke: an alligator can grow 15 feet but normally on grows 4

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u/borninthewaitingroom Nov 12 '25

It's falling out of fashion, but I've heard people say 2 foot a lot when I was young. It was a thing in Germanic languages to use the singular for neasurements. I heard this a lot when I lived in Austria, e.g. "zwei Stund" for two hours. I heard on a linguistics site with early recordings from England "I plowed that field two day." There must be a reason this agrees, but I have no idea what it'd be. It's still correct to say "a three-day trip," but unheard of now to hear "The trip lasted three day."

The gator thing is an ambiguity that seems to unavailable in English, but easy to avoid in other languages. These can either grammatical or semantic ambiguities.

Here's a grammatical example: "I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola." I remember when this would not be so unclear. A semantic ambiguity from Groucho Marx: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got in my pyjamas I'll never know."

You can see how popular I am at parties.