simont | (no subject)

Unusually for a Monday, I feel more rested today than I did yesterday.

Saturday night was the house-cooling at Impropriety. The theme was ‘come as something improper’; lacking the means and the motive[1] to follow the spirit of this theme, I decided to hide behind the letter, so I put a sticky label on my T-shirt bearing the improper fraction 5/3. This got a wide range of reactions, from blank looks through groans to one or two honestly delighted laughs and/or hugs, so I think on balance I did OK there.

As I left the party at nearly 2am I heard noises behind me suggesting that it was just about to get really improper. I seem to have a knack for leaving parties just at the right moment…

Sadly, I still left too late for comfort, since after spending an hour at home airing out the house before going to bed it was nearly 3am and I needed to be up for noon the next day to have lunch with Mum. Still, I got there only ten minutes late in the end, so that was all right. And my surprise present to Mum seemed to go down well, so that was good too. Unfortunately, by the time I got home and guests began to arrive for the roving Doctor Who gathering, I was feeling pretty awful, and had little patience with either the Doctor himself or the board game we played in between episodes. But a good night's sleep has done wonders, so I'm feeling better now.

[1] Arrgh. I lacked the means and I lacked the motive. I'm unable to decide whether I should therefore say that I lacked the means and the motive, or that I lacked the means or the motive. Where's Augustus de Morgan when you need him?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You lacked both motive and means...

That's certainly literally accurate, but I worried that it might be interpreted merely as "I didn't have both", i.e. that there was at least one which I lacked.

English doesn't bracket in the same way as mathematical expressions. In particular, verbs associate with each following noun (distributive? possibly).

Thus "Do you prefer X or Y" is not "Do you prefer (X or Y)", it's "Do you prefer X, or do you prefer Y?"

Similarly "I lack A and B" expands to "I lack A and I lack B", rather than "I lack (A and B)"

You lacked both means and motive; you had neither means nor motive.

Perhaps 'lacked both means and motive', 'had neither means nor motive' or 'lacking either means or motive' are all fine?

I think that if "lacking both X and Y" and "lacking either X or Y" are synonymous, that's even worse! There are two clearly defined things I might have wanted to say (that each of X and Y was a thing I did not have, or that I did not simultaneously have both of X and Y), and I had at least hoped that the two "lacking" forms would take one of these meanings each :-)

I would probably understand and use these 2 forms more or less synonymously as well, in many situations. While I appreciate the distinction you wish to make, I suspect that actual usage is (as usual) far more varied and potentially ambiguous.

I thought "Lacking either X or Y" meant "There were two things X and Y, and I lacked one of them, but I'm not going to tell you which". Like "Add either substance A or substance B" doesn't mean add both, it means choose one and add it.

Well, yes, but that's an oversimplified example. The key point about "lacking" is that a listener may think of it as synonymous with "not having", at which point the both/either thing has a tendency to flip; "lacking either", by your definition, doesn't mean the same thing as "not having either", and if the listener has forgotten by the end of the sentence which verb form I used, it'll leave them uncertain of the meaning.

Nonetheless there seems to be a general consensus here that "lacking both" means "not having either", and that my post was therefore correct as written. It looks as if, had I wanted to say "not having both / lacking (at least) one", I'd have had to reword to avoid confusion...

Perhaps you should have said:

:) - guess who has been writing reports all day...

Aaaah. I think I was treating 'lacking' as a thing that you do in relation to the specific object, rather than a simple inverse of 'having'.

Language is a great thing.