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ambiguity

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ambiguity

Visual ambiguity: a woman or a saxophone player?

Definition:

The presence of two or more possible meanings in a single passage. Also, a fallacy in which the same term is used in more than one way. Adjective: ambiguous.

See also:

Etymology:

From the Latin, "wandering about"

Examples and Observations:

  • "As I was leaving this morning, I said to myself, 'The last thing you must do is forget your speech.' And, sure enough, as I left the house this morning, the last thing I did was to forget my speech."
    (Rowan Atkinson)


  • I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.


  • We saw her duck.


  • Roy Rogers: More hay, Trigger?
    Trigger: No thanks, Roy, I'm stuffed!


  • Pentagon Plans Swell Deficit
    (newspaper headline)


  • I can't recommend this book too highly.


  • "Leahy Wants FBI to Help Corrupt Iraqi Police Force"
    (headline at CNN.com, December 2006)


  • Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
    (newspaper headline)


  • Union Demands Increased Unemployment
    (newspaper headline)


  • "Thanks for dinner. I’ve never seen potatoes cooked like that before."
    (Jonah Baldwin in the film Sleepless in Seattle, 1993)


  • Because
    "Because can be ambiguous. 'I didn't go to the party because Mary was there' may mean that Mary's presence dissuaded me from going or that I went to sample the canapes."
    (David Marsh and Amelia Hodsdon, Guardian Style. Guardian Books, 2010)


  • Pun and Irony
    "Quintilian uses amphibolia (III.vi.46) to mean 'ambiguity,' and tells us (Vii.ix.1) that its species are innumerable; among them, presumably, are Pun and Irony."
    (Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Univ. of California Press, 1991)


    "An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense: any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language. . . .

    "We call it ambiguous, I think, when we recognize that there could be a puzzle as to what the author meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading. If a pun is quite obvious it would not be called ambiguous, because there is no room for puzzling. But if an irony is calculated to deceive a section of its readers, I think it would ordinarily be called ambiguous."
    (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1947)
Pronunciation: am-big-YOU-it-tee
Also Known As: amphibologia, amphibolia, semantic ambiguity, equivocation

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