A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end.
Wikipedia has all sorts of interesting curiosities tucked away in its nooks and crannies. An example of a garden path sentence given in this entry is "The government plans to raise taxes were defeated."
When it comes to Washington’s current (and to all appearances permanent) fiscal fracas, the semantic weeds are as high as an elephant’s eye and higher than a donkey’s. In the battles over debt limits, fiscal cliffs, continuing resolutions, and the budget, the clashing sides deploy duelling vocabularies. The Democrats’ revenue enhancements, public investments, and “the one per cent” are the Republicans’ tax hikes, reckless government spending, and “the job creators.” Reading from left to right, the inheritance tax is the estate tax is the death tax. The Dems prevail in a few of these skirmishes, the Reps in a few more. Most are stalemated. But in one of them the conservative side long ago won a decisive victory, a victory at once famous and infamous: “entitlements.”
Hendrik Hertzberg on the Republican rhetorical victory over programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Too bad Google's Ngram viewer doesn't go beyond 2008 now, but even up to then the Google Ngram for entitlements shows a steady rise through the late 1990's, and it's still far above what it was in the 1970's.
Books aren't the ideal or most complete corpus for measuring the use of this term in political discourse, but it does seem to support Hertzberg's thesis.
From Marginal Revolution from a long time ago, but it still irks me because it puts government revenue above consumer safety.
The 55 mph speed limit was a vain attempt by the Federal government to reduce gasoline consumption; initially passed in the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act the law was relaxed in 1987 and finally repealed in 1995 allowing states to choose their speed limits. Highways and cars are safer today than in the 1970s and on many highways speed limits were increased to 65 mph. Higher speed limits are often safer because what is worse than speed is variable speed, some people driving fast and some driving slow. When the speed limit is set too low you get lots of people who safely break the law and a few law-abiders who make the roads more dangerous.
Unfortunately vestiges of the 55mph limit remain, in part because police like the 55mph limit which lets them write tickets at will whenever they need an increase in revenues.
I think of this every time I pass from a 65mph zone into a 55mph speed limit on the highway.
I wonder how they'll replace this revenue stream when we are all sitting in self-driving cars that won't exceed the speed limit.
Kottke refeatured a great video explaining differential gears in automobiles. Namely, how does a car handle the problem of the outside wheel having to travel further than the inside wheel when a car turns a corner if the wheels are connected by a fixed axle?
Well, trains have the same issue, and they do not have differential gears. So how do they handle that problem, and more importantly, how do trains stay on the track? Who better to explain this than the great Richard Feynman.
Don’t tell my employer, but aside from some mildly unpleasant things like going on TV or talking to politicians, I’m doing exactly what I would do if I was a billionaire and didn’t have to work. That is, what counts as work for me might as well be leisure. For all intents and purposes, I am indeed working only 15 hours a week just as Keynes predicted.
Jerry Brito on the post materialist revolution. We may not be as wealthy as our parents, but they couldn't stream House of Cards on their iPhone.