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I couldn’t resist reporting on a very nice piece of unintentional (I think!) ambiguity in today’s Guardian newspaper.
The article concerns the rise of food banks in the UK to supply food to people in financial difficulties. At one point it dealt with the supply of food hampers to families at Christmas time and mentioned the fact that a magnanimous delivery company had turned its fleet of vehicles over “to hamper distribution”.
It might be helpful to you if I point out that the word hamper is a noun meaning a basket, usually made of cane, and used for taking food on picnics and things like that. But the word is also a verb meaning “to obstruct”.
Of course the phrase would probably not be ambiguous if it were spoken. Why not?
Photo credit: Flickr. Used under this licence.
Isn’t a hamper in American lingo what Britons call a laundry basket?
And here’s the sentence as printed in (the online version of) the Guardian:
“Any day now, a local firm, World of Furniture, will stop delivering sofas and lend its fleet of vans to hamper distribution [...].”
I grew up in the USA; laundry baskets are the same between the two countries. Hamper has the basket-containing-food meaning on both sides, though it’s less used in the USA. In the USA I think it connotes a basket carrying a picnic, whereas in England I’ve only heard it used to describe a basket of food gifts.
The prosody will distinguish the usage, in particular the placement of the nuclear tone.
Jill, thanks for this!
Martin Ball: I agree, tho reading it back it did not seem immediately apparent the phrase was ambiguous, despite living in a part of the United States where this duality exists, and yes, a hamper is a (large) laundry basket here.
I would speak the noun+noun phrase with a relatively high sustained pitch, and the verb+noun with a more significant drop off from the 1st to 2nd syllable of ‘hamper’.
Re: hamper and laundry basket
“Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language”. (credit to whoever said this).
George Bernard Shaw, apparently (although I always believed it to be Oscar Wilde…)
Garbelygoo, was your immediate reading of the sentence as the n+n or the v+n phrase? I am only used to hearing the noun with e.g. ‘food -’ or ‘christmas -’, so my initial reading was unambiguously the v+n.
Cristina: v+n definitely. I think the “lend…to” tipped me off; I expected either a verb or a pronoun or name after it. “lend…for” would accept the other interpretation a bit better.
I sometimes wonder about what writing does to a language.
…And call me Nathan. I don’t know why I’m using that silly handle.