![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maradyddI was chatting just now with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ti94 about a game for which he maintains the OS X port. He logged out abruptly in the middle of the conversation, then returned a few seconds later and said:
Tris: It aids discussion when Adium fails to crash.
Now it reads like a perfectly ordinary sentence, but at first it garden-pathed me quite nicely. I found myself looking for an external referent for "it", because I wasn't sure whether the network hiccup had been on his end or mine; if it had been on mine and he hadn't noticed, I might have missed a part of the conversation. Instead, of course, it was just heavy NP shift ("Adium failing to crash aids discussion"), but it threw me for a second.
I wonder if on some level I expect that poor network connectivity is more likely than heavy NP shift. :)
ti94 about a game for which he maintains the OS X port. He logged out abruptly in the middle of the conversation, then returned a few seconds later and said:Tris: It aids discussion when Adium fails to crash.
Now it reads like a perfectly ordinary sentence, but at first it garden-pathed me quite nicely. I found myself looking for an external referent for "it", because I wasn't sure whether the network hiccup had been on his end or mine; if it had been on mine and he hadn't noticed, I might have missed a part of the conversation. Instead, of course, it was just heavy NP shift ("Adium failing to crash aids discussion"), but it threw me for a second.
I wonder if on some level I expect that poor network connectivity is more likely than heavy NP shift. :)
