tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 24 06:35:29 2004

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: a little bit pregnant?

MorphemeAddict ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol taghwI']

In a message dated 2004-04-24 4:04:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
[email protected] writes:

> ghItlhpu' lay'tel SIvten:
> 
> >this is a bad example, i think.  of course, a woman is either pregnant or 
> >not, so there is no middle ground, no "little bit".  or is there?  the way 
> >it is used is that she has been pregnant for only a short time, or that her 
> >pregnancy isn't very obvious, in which case it makes perfect sense.
> 
> It does make sense, but only because the semantics of "pregnant" have 
> shifted slightly. The word "pregnant" carries visual or temporal 
> connotations: a woman can *look* pregnant without actually *being* pregnant, 
> a staple of countless comedy skits.
> 
perhaps, but not what i had in mind.  i was talking about literally being 
pregnant.

> For me, either the foetus is implanted and growing (in which case she is 
> pregnant) or it is not (in which case she is not pregnant). To use my other 
> 

no, but is a hole a state or quality?  i don't think so.

> Both of these might be understandable in some instances, but add other 
> qualifiers to them and we get things that are either unusual or outright 
> 

neither of these two examples sounds odd to me.

I don't 
> think I know what I'd do if my future wife were to come up to me and say 
> "Honey, I'm a little bit pregnant." Did the test come back as only a little 
> bit positive? :)
> 
> Perhaps it would have been better if I'd given some context or the Klingon 
> term:
> 
> puqbe': vavoy, SoSoy, jIyatlh... (Dad, Mum, I'm pregnant...)
> nItebHa' vav SoS je: bIyatlh'a' SoH??? (You're PREGNANT???)
> puqbe': qay'be', jIyatlhqu'be'! (It's OK, I'm not very pregnant!)
> 
> Another example is "a little bit dead". There's no middle ground (although 
> some would disagree).
> 
to quote from star trek 4:  "Gracie is not only pregnant, she is VERY 
pregnant!" (iirc)

i wasn't using pregnant in any figurative sense.  i meant it quite literally.
a woman is either pregnant or not.  if she is not pregnant, then she is 0% 
pregnant.  if she is pregnant, the amount of her pregnancy is positive and 
greater than zero.

i agree that it would be a little bit weird for a woman to announce her 
pregnancy by saying "Honey, I'm a little bit pregnant".  it would be a lot more 
normal to announce "Honey, I'm pregnant" to establish that her amount of 
pregnancy is non-zero, to which her mate might reply "Pregnant?  How pregnant are 
you?", and she then answer "Only a little bit.", meaning (probably) that she is in 
the initial stage of pregnancy. (similar to your klingon example above).

another example of this kind of thing is whether a door is open or shut.  if 
it's shut, it's 0% open, but if it's open, it might be open only a crack, or 
it might be wide open, i.e., any positive number up to and including 100%.

your example of "a little bit dead" is a good one.  a person can't be a 
little bit dead, because being dead means 0% alive.  but a person can be anywhere 
in the range of barely alive to totally alive, i.e. any positive number up to 
and including 100%.

many states of being have one term which can only be the 0% of the range, 
while the other, opposite, term includes any percentage except 0.
and being "a little bit pregnant" does NOT also mean "a lot non-pregnant".  
even if someone is a little bit pregnant, she is still definitely pregnant.  
only if she is 0% pregnant can she be non-pregnant.

"For a binary state, the positive pole is often scalable, even though the 
negative pole is not. For example, there are several degrees of 
'pregnancy','openness', 'fullness', and 'inebriation', but the same does not apply to their 
opposites 'non-pregnant', 'closed', 'empty', and 'sober'."


lay'tel SIvten

Back to archive top level