New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs

Re:New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs by kjhughes on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:25PM (#14574113)

Same here.

I believe the effect is similar to that of a garden path sentence[1] except instead of discovering a grammatical inconsistency and having to backtrack to re-parse, the grammatical context misleads the lexical level so much so that we "see" 'Paris' where 'Pairs' actually exists. I suspect that the 'P' being capitalized further supports the 'Paris' misinterpretation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

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Re:New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs by qb45 on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:42AM (#14575226)

So semantic analysis of born in provides hints to the lexer, turning Pairs into Paris?

I can tell you it gets even more bizarre: I once misread "bluetooth is dead" as "IrDA is dead" and was like, "duh, no shit, Sherlock, how is this even a news?".

So, apparently, everything gets lexed right initially, then it goes to semantic analysis which figures out that some comms standard is dead, obviously IrDA is a comms standard which is virtually dead nowadays, this tidbit is fed back into the parser, which stabilizes on its final output: IrDA is dead. Kill me.

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Re:New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs by gpvos on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:12AM (#14575132)

Also, the weird English custom to capitalize most words in titles, but not in normal sentences, adds to the confusion here.

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Re:New Evidence That All Stars Are Born in Pairs by cormullion on Saturday June 17, 2017 @07:30AM (#14575379)

US-English, I think. British-English headlines are less caps-heavy.

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