I just received the following letter:
Dear Professor Shallit,
I am a graduate student in XXX University majoring in YYY. I want to cite one of your papers that should be of great use to my current research. The title of the paper is "Randomized Algorithms in Number Theory", published on Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 39 (1986), S1.
Because our library does not have access to the article, it should be best that you send me a copy via email.
I really appreciate your worthless help!
Now that's the way to ask for a reprint!
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12 comments:
i don't know whether to laugh or feel bad after reading that.
The source of the error seems obvious — the "worth" of something is often its "price", yet "worthless" in English means the opposite of the (surely) intended "priceless", or "beyond worth".
It really is kinda unfair on non-native-speakers that "priceless" and "worthless" have such very different meanings.
In addition to "priceless", another similar English word is "invaluable". It is easy to imagine how a similar idea in some other language may have been mistranslated into "worthless"...
(I presume the sender is not a native speaker of English! This is suggested by "published on", and by the somewhat peremptory "it should be best that you send…" which is probably supposed to mean something like "it would be great if you could send…".)
I often watch out for potential double meanings and point them out when I hear them to my daughter:
"Left speechless by that song",
"The world has never seen this book's equal"
etc...
it should be best that you send me a copy via email
...because it would cost more and take longer to send a hard copy by post.
Perhaps that's what the requester meant. Assuming that your internet connection and setup is practically "free," your help should be "worthless" (as well as priceless). :)
You did send it to him, right? He seems to have been trying very hard to be polite, mistakes aside...
copied from word detective:
A story (possibly apocryphal, I must note) is told about Sir Christopher Wren, the brilliant architect who designed St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Following the Great Fire of 1666, Wren was asked to rebuild the devastated cathedral, which he did. Viewing the restoration, Queen Anne is said to have proclaimed it "awful, artificial and amusing." Rather than repairing to his garret to sulk, Wren was thrilled with the royal review, because at that time "awful" meant "awe-inspiring," "artificial" meant "clever" or "artistic," and "amusing" meant roughly "riveting" or "astonishing."
http://www.word-detective.com/050404.html
i would have said artificial meant with great artifice
jah
Different fellow from this one, I suppose:
http://recursed.blogspot.com/2010/01/when-is-request-inappropriate.html
I read about a fellow who burned down a home fix-it store because he was demonstrating to a customer that a certain product was not flammable. After all, the product was labelled INflammable.
I cannot bring myself to use expressions such as invaluable (I'd rather say priceless) or [cannot be overestimated] it sounds as if I want to say should not be exaggerated
One of our workers in Spain assured us that he was "hardly working" on his project.
"I'd rather say priceless"
Just make sure you don't use it after "That's". Won't quite have the same meaning.
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