Recently, Mr. Luo Xiang, the creator of "Zhang San, a fanatic outside the law", made a guest appearance in "Anti-New Year Talk Show".
This talk show is wonderful. Those who haven't seen it can go and have a look. In my opinion, as far as this talk show is concerned, Mr. Luo is no less than a professional talk show actor in baggage setting and rhythm control.
Although I like talk shows-I like all kinds of language and art programs-I'm really busy recently, and I don't have time to watch variety shows. In fact, I didn't finish watching the talk show "New Year's Eve" completely, but I just specially searched the paragraph of Mr. Luo Xiang.
I did this because I found that many people in my circle of friends were turning over a sentence inside:
When many people forward it, they will also be accompanied by comments such as "It is in my heart".
As we all know, I am a very sensitive person to language phenomena. I wonder-this sentence is normal! In Luo Xiang's talk show, this is not the most wonderful sentence, but why do people like to turn this sentence?
I didn't solve my doubts until I saw someone turning over the picture below.
The comments in the picture completely misinterpreted Mr. Luo Xiang's original intention.
Is it because everyone misunderstood this sentence that it was forwarded?
I searched this sentence of teacher Luo Xiang in Baidu and found many similar misinterpretations:
Why do I say that this explanation completely misinterprets Mr. Luo Xiang's original intention? The key lies in the word "probably".
Luo Xiang's original words were "absolutely possible". What does this mean? It means that this possibility cannot be ruled out. In English, Mr Luo Xiang is talking about possibilities.
However, if "completely possible" is understood as "possible", we will stop talking about possibility and talk about probability. The former English is possibility, while the latter English is probability.
According to my observation, possibility and probability are two concepts that people often commit. Possibility is a choice, which is about existence, either possible or impossible. The probability is a percentage, which can be any number from 0 to 100%.
There is a conditional probability in probability theory, that is, the probability that an event occurs under certain conditions. Obviously, there is no evidence that a person who claims to be law-abiding will increase his probability of being a scum, although the possibility that he is a scum cannot be ruled out.
Why do people misunderstand this sentence? I think there may be two reasons.
First, the fuzziness of everyday language. In Chinese, the word "possible" has both possible meanings in English and possible meanings in English.
In fact, if you look up English-Chinese dictionaries, both possible and probable are translated into "possible", and some rigorous English-Chinese dictionaries will translate probable into "very possible".
However, if you look up the English explanations of these two words, you will find that their meanings are quite different. Let me take the Corinthian dictionary as an example.
From Ying Ying's explanation, we can see that the possible meaning is "although I don't know whether it is right or wrong, I accept that it may be right", while the possible meaning is "it is probably true and will happen".
If you are still a little confused after reading the explanation in the dictionary, let's examine the possible and approximate collocation. Anyone engaged in corpus linguistics knows J. R. Firth's famous saying:
In English, possible can be preceded by completely, which is equivalent to "completely possible" in Chinese:
However, the entire American Contemporary English Corpus (COCA) contains 65.438+billion words, but there is no possible example. It is not surprising that complete and probable can't match in meaning, just as we can't say "completely possible" in Chinese.
In fact, because of this connection and difference in the sense of possibility and possibility, they are often used for comparison, such as:
We can find many such examples in coca.
The second reason is my speculation. I think many people resonate after misunderstanding this sentence because people are increasingly disgusted with all kinds of X-dressed people. It is natural to hear people say that people who flaunt certain kinds of people are "more likely" to be scum-although this is a misunderstanding.
There are many ambiguities in everyday language, besides the "possibility" mentioned today, there are also "fairness" and "equality" mentioned in my previous article. Usually, it doesn't matter if there is ambiguity. But when it comes to value judgment or criticism, it is necessary to find out the exact meaning of words in the context, otherwise it may bring harm to the parties.
I didn't mean to, but it's not the first time that Luo Xiang has been understood by others. Last time I wrote some thoughts about reading, I was scolded by Weibo. Don't make any mistakes this time.
Anyway, the terrible year 2020 is almost over, and we really deserve to have a good time at the end of the year, even if this wonderful feeling is brought about by misunderstanding. Today, we also learned the difference between possible and probable by the way, which is also fortunate.
I hope 202 1 is better for all of us. Finally, let me make sentences with possibility and possibility as my expectation for the coming year:
It is possible that the coming year will still be a bad year, but I believe it is unlikely. Maybe the next year will be terrible, but I believe this possibility is very small.