This website is about writing, but I’m going to digress into the spoken word….

Ambiguous Punctuation

© 2018 Ken Bresler

Punctuation matters, even with spoken words. The recent movie Death of Stalin provides a wonderful example. (It was officially released in 2017, but hit cinemas in 2018.)

A Soviet official, when presented with a request regarding Josef Stalin’s funeral, replied, “No problem.” When his colleagues objected, he backed down and modified his reply, pretending not to: “No. Problem.” That was actor Jeffrey Tambor, portraying Georgy Malenkov, who succeeded Josef Stalin as premier of the Soviet Union.

An anonymous comment in the IMDB.com entry for the movie called this an “amphibology,” which introduced me to the word. It means an ambiguous grammatical construction. More importantly, the comment speculated that Malenkov’s amphibology was “a nod” to a famous Russian one, “Pardon impossible to execute.” “According to the position of full stop in the sentence, or based on the intonation of the speaker,” that phrase “can be understood either [as] ‘Pardon. Impossible to execute,’ or ‘Pardon impossible. Execute.’”

Is there something in the Russian condition conducive to amphibologies involving punctuating the ends of sentences? Have you heard this one?

In a celebration in Red Square, Stalin reads a cablegram from his exiled rival Leon Trotsky:

YOU WERE RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG. YOU ARE THE TRUE HEIR OF LENIN. I SHOULD APOLOGIZE.

                                                                                                TROTSKY

The crowd roars at Stalin’s triumph. A tailor catches Stalin’s attention and says, “Such a message, Comrade Stalin. For the ages. But you read it without the right feeling!”

Stalin tells the crowd, “Here is a simple worker, a loyal communist, who says I haven’t read the message from Trotsky with enough feeling! Come, Comrade Worker! Up here! You read this historic communication!”

The tailor climbs to the reviewing stand and reads:

YOU WERE RIGHT AND I WAS WRONG? YOU ARE THE TRUE HEIR OF LENIN? I SHOULD APOLOGIZE??!!

                                                                                                TROTSKY!

That joke appears in the preface to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. He doesn’t take credit for it. He calls it a classic.

Which reminds me of an oral amphibology that we told in high school. A woman curtly objects to a man’s advances: “Oh. Please. Don’t. Stop.” Then she acquiesces beseechingly: “Oh, please don’t stop.”

In the #MeToo era, be sure that you know the difference between “No problem” and “No. Problem.”