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Here is a question I've encountered:

How can you lift an elephant with one hand?

The answer provided is:

It is not a problem, since you will never find an elephant with one hand.

Now, if I actually want this sentence to mean that can I lift an elephant with a single hand (meaning my own hand), how would I say that?

Heartspring
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dumbPotato21
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    Have you considered restructuring the sentence, rephrasing any of it? – Spagirl Apr 10 '17 at 12:42
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    1. (imperative) Lift a whole elephant using just one hand. 2. (rhetorical question) How do you lift an elephant using one hand only? – Mari-Lou A Apr 10 '17 at 14:07
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    @Mari-Lou A: Putting aside the "pragmatic" disambiguation that elephants only have feet, not hands, you can't really get round OP's problem by substituting *using* for *with* (which still allows the "perverse" interpretation that this hypothetical elephant might be using just one "hand" to do something, whilst at the same time resisting being lifted). – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 14:16
  • @FumbleFingers There's no ambiguity, no one would interpret those examples the way you suggested. – Mari-Lou A Apr 10 '17 at 14:26
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    @Mari-LouA No one would interpret the original question to refer to a one-handed elephant either, except to be deliberately annoying. In both the original and your rephrasing, both interpretations are grammatically possible, though one is unlikely in the extreme. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 14:39
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    Related: What is funny in this paraprosdokian?, What is the name of the ambiguity in the phrase “I want to visit clubs with attractive women”?, Antecedent of “naked” in “I would like to paint a picture of you naked”, Does “I am eating vegan cheese in my underpants” really imply that the vegan cheese is inside my underpants?, http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147208 – herisson Apr 10 '17 at 15:04
  • @sumelic: I think your excellent answer on that cheese in my underpants question is sufficiently generic that this one can reasonably be closed as a duplicate. – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 15:18
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    @Janus Bahs Jacquet: If we make some minor changes so the pragmatics aren't quite so dominant, Could you wrestle a chimpanzee with one arm tied? seems more credibly "ambiguous" to me. But changing that again slightly, Could you wrestle a chimpanzee to the ground* with one arm tied?* doesn't seem to allow *any* possibility of a perverse interpretation. Is that true? And if so, *why?* – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 15:26
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    I still think the answer is 'press the lift button for him'. – Spagirl Apr 10 '17 at 15:30
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    @FumbleFingers Because if you have a prepositional phrase modifying a noun phrase, you cannot separate the two phrases by something that modifies another element in the sentence. PPs that modify the main verb in a sentence generally follow any objects there may be, so in the first variant, with one arm tied can be applied to both the verb and the object. In the second one, though, to the ground cannot possibly modify the chimp: it must modify the verb; so the PP that follows cannot modify the chimp either. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 15:31
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    @FumbleFingers Of course, if you reverse the two PPs, things get even worse: Could you wrestle a chimpanzee with one arm tied to the ground? is hopelessly ambiguous because the two PPs can be taken separately or together, modifying either the verb or the chimp—and tied can belong to either! Could you wrestle a tied-armed chimp to the ground? Or a one-armed chimp while you were tied to the ground? Or one whose arm was tied to the ground? Or while your arm was tied to the ground? The possibilities are endless! – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 15:35
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    @Janus: At the time I raised it, I was thinking in terms of Could you wrestle with one arm tied? (effectively, the prepositional phrase adverbially modifying *wrestle). But as you imply, it's more like a restructuring of underlying Could you with one arm tied wrestle?* (adjectivally modifying the only possible noun - *you). I'm now thinking the "rule" for interpreting multiple consecutive relative clauses is: candidates for "credible referent noun" that have already been "stepped back" over for a preceding relative clause cannot be considered for subsequent clauses.* – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 16:04
  • @FumbleFingers No, I’d say with one arm tied modifies the verb. It’s basically simple nesting, like nesting XML tags: you can use a PP to modify both the verb (PP[V]) and the object (the chimp; PP[O]), but if you do, you have to order them as 《V ⟨O PP[O]⟩ PP[V]》, properly nested. You can’t mismatch your end tags and do 《V ⟨O PP[V]》 PP[O]⟩. If you interpret the first PP as modifying the verb, the what comes after has to as well. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 16:17
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    If someone tells this joke, ending with the statement, "you will never find an elephant with one hand," I think a response might be: "Really? How many hands do you need in order to find an elephant?" – David K Apr 10 '17 at 16:22
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdVTCDdEwI – johnny Apr 10 '17 at 17:55
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    @DavidK That's precisely how I interpreted it when I first read it! Lol – Aleksandr Hovhannisyan Apr 10 '17 at 18:08
  • I don't get it. – Mitch Apr 10 '17 at 18:27
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    Before or after you shoot him in your pajamas? – Arm the good guys in America Apr 10 '17 at 19:29
  • @Clare: You can bet your ass I'd shoot any elephant that got in my pyjamas! Well, obviously I'd shoo him out into the open first, to avoid any potential collateral damage "down below"! :) – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 21:00
  • How can you lift an elephant using one hand? – Tim Hallman Apr 10 '17 at 22:57
  • How can you lift an elephant with one hand? With great difficulty! – Gary Apr 11 '17 at 07:28
  • @davidk to which an appropriate response might be, "why surely many. For lifting an elephant with one hand, is a feat worthy of great applause!" – Gary Apr 11 '17 at 07:34
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    commenting since the question was closed just 12 min. ago: You can do that in microgravity. Get yourself and the elephant in orbit, and gently prod him with one of your hands in an upwards direction. – Victor Jalencas Apr 11 '17 at 12:21
  • Pick up a phone and call a local hangelephant. – MetaEd Apr 11 '17 at 17:44
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    Now a serious point. When you use someone else's work in your question, you must clearly identify the original work. Please edit your question to credit the author(s) of the quoted question and answer, and if possible provide a link to the original work. – MetaEd Apr 11 '17 at 17:54
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    @sumelic Exact quotations must be credited regardless of the nature of the material. As I read the question, both the question and the answer are exact quotations. Also, joke theft is no laughing matter. :-) – MetaEd Apr 11 '17 at 22:43
  • Sure. If there are differences I'm not aware of them. – MetaEd Apr 11 '17 at 23:07
  • @MetaEd: I have made the following meta post: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/294641/do-questions-about-jokes-need-to-provide-attribution – herisson Apr 11 '17 at 23:29
  • Maybe change to a constructed language with no ambiguities, (but how fun woud that be?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban – Viktor Mellgren Apr 12 '17 at 09:39

11 Answers11

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The question is perfectly grammatical, but ambiguous (which is part of the joke, actually). Your own interpretation is just as valid as the one stated by the answer and makes more sense from a practical point of view.

It's possible to remove the ambiguity with one of the alternatives provided by the other answers but, really, you shouldn't.

lly
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Glorfindel
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    I don't think it's a question of grammar but of semantics. the OP's question is perfectly grammatical, and makes sense. – Mari-Lou A Apr 10 '17 at 14:29
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    @Mari-LouA yes, thanks. I meant that the grammatical 'breakdown' of the question can be done in two different ways, making it 'grammatically ambiguous', not wrong. Edited to make that more clear. – Glorfindel Apr 10 '17 at 15:02
  • The question is really not ambiguous. The joke is that you are taking something that is not ambiguous and forcing it to become so. – Kevin Apr 10 '17 at 17:14
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    @Kevin It's not necessarily semantically ambiguous, but it is grammatically ambiguous. "How can you lift an elephant with one hand?", "How can you lift an elephant with two forklifts?" and "How can you lift an elephant with three legs?" are identical in construction, but are likely to be understood differently in a non-joke context because of the meaning. The raw grammar of the sentence can be parsed either way, but the meaning (semantics) favors one over the other. – R.M. Apr 10 '17 at 20:05
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    In the same vein there's the classic pair "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." It's all in the parsing. – Ethan Bolker Apr 12 '17 at 12:35
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One possibility is:

Using only one of your hands, how can you lift an elephant?

Even "How can you lift an elephant using only one hand" is ambiguous. The elephant may be using one of your hands.

"How can you lift an elephant with just one of your hands?" may be interpreted as an elephant that has stolen one of your hands, but not the other.

To be unambiguous, the sentence must be constructed such that the modifier is not adjacent to the object.

jejorda2
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A possible re-writing is

How can you lift an elephant one-handed?

One-handed can act as either a adjective or an adverb. If it is placed after the object ("elephant"), the word order implies that it is being used in the adverbial sense, and so is modifying the verb ("lift") rather than the object. If you wanted to ask the "joke" sense of the question, you would instead say

How can you lift a one-handed elephant?

Michael Seifert
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    +1. This one requires an absolutely preposterous amount of tinkering with grammar to beat. The only way I can think of is to consider one-handed some kind of pseudo-heraldic postpositioned adjective: “I don’t know, I can only ever find elephants rampant, never any elephants one-handed”. And that is a stretch. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 14:41
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    @JanusBahsJacquet "One-handedly" on the other hand is a word I've heard - and even used - a lot. – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 15:34
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    @Araucaria Even better. Can’t think of any way to get around that one. And if you were the type of person who’d be fine with wrangling one-handedly into the category of postpositive heraldic adjectives, then you should be immediately shot, so your rebuttal wouldn’t matter anyway. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 15:38
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Shot or not, they’d simply be wrong as “one-handedly” is an adverb and not (could not be) an adjective. – KRyan Apr 10 '17 at 20:30
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    @KRyan That was rather my point. ;-) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 20:41
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Answer:

Like this:

How can you lift an elephant one-handedly?

A definition of one-handedly from Oxford dictionaries:

Adverb

With or using only one hand.

Explanation of why it works ...

Some English grammar

There is a reason why this sentence—in contrast to the Original Poster's more intriguing one—is unambiguous.

In the original example, the preposition phrase with one hand could be modifying the verb phrase lift an elephant, or it could be modifying the noun elephant. One reason for this is that preposition phrases in English can modify verb phrases:

  • [[climb mountains] at the weekend]

And they can also modify nouns:

  • [[parties] at the weekend]

The example in this answer post, on the other hand, uses an adverb to modify the verb phrase lift an elephant. Adverbs can freely modify verb phrases:

  • It quickly evaporated
  • It evaporated quickly

But adverbs can't premodify nouns:

  • *It was a quickly evaporation (ungrammatical)

And they rarely postmodify them either:

  • *It was an evaporation quickly. (ungrammatical)

And that's why the adverb one-handedly can only be modifying the verb phrase lift an elephant and not the noun phrase elephant.

Notes for grammar junkies

It used to be commonly thought that adverbs never modified nouns. However, recent work in corpus linguistics has shown this to not be true. Certain types of adverbs can very occasionally postmodify certain types of noun:

- The riots recently are going to cause problem for years to come.

Here we see recently modifying the noun riots. This can't be a sentence adverb, because the sentence as a whole is referring to the future, whereas recently refers to the recent past.

Araucaria - Him
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    I see that although Oxford dictionaries also have an entry for (unexceptional) adjectival *one-legged, they don't go so far as to explicitly define adverbial one-leggedly*. That one might seem "an adverb too far" when just presented in isolation, but apparently it's far from unknown in Google Books. – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 16:11
  • Is recently really modifying the noun as such? Or is it the only thing left from a reduced relative clause (earthquakes which have occurred recently)? Granted, that would mean that non-repeated information was reduced away, which I have a nagging suspicion is not comme il faut, but intuitively that's closer to how recently ‘feels’ in my head… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 20:14
  • @JanusBahsJacquet If you'd said "earthquakes which were recently" and that was grammatical then that would have been a theory with some mileage. But given that relative clauses don't have an unlimited capacity for arbitrary reduction, especially in terms of the deletion of lexical verbs, I don't think that many linguists would find that persuasive (which wouln't mean it wasn't true, although I don't reckon it is). There are enough problems with whiz-deletion as it is (for example, * my friend annoyed). But those are only my own thoughts ... But in case you're interested ... – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 20:22
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    @JanusBahsJacquet ... Here's a paper by John Payne, R Huddlestion and GK Pullum - one of the first, if not the first, to document the postmodification of English nouns by adverbs. Their arguments are much more persuasive than mine! (I can't remember all or many of them) The most pertinent info is in the second half of that paper. It's an interesting paper altogether, though, if you're interested in English grammar. – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 20:25
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    @FumbleFingers The theory is that we would expect most modern adjectives to be modifiable by the suffix -ly in order to turn them into adverbs. Dictionaries may not list them, but because this is a productive affix, we should be able to add -ly to many adjectives to produce adverbs that have never been used before pefectly grammatically. It's nice to see some evidence for that assertion and I think you're definitely right there. – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 20:49
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    Ignoring howlers like Webster's dord, if something appears in a dictionary, it must in some meaningful sense be a "word". But I'm sure you and I would agree that the implied corollary (if it's not in the dictionary, it's not a word) can't be relied on. I like your earthquakes recently example, but it's way past my pay grade to get involved in deciding exactly why it's "acceptable" (which it is, just about, to me). – FumbleFingers Apr 10 '17 at 20:52
  • @FumbleFingers Yes exactly. And that's why your one-leggedly examples are so delicious. (The good ones there, obviously!) – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 20:56
  • @FumbleFingers Nice link. I'm going to be talking about dords for weeks now. That's a great piece of real information about linguistic evidence - one of the things I'm looking at at the moment ... – Araucaria - Him Apr 10 '17 at 21:36
  • I'm not keen on recently post modifying earthquakes or even riots, and Google Books seems to agree the riots recently compared to the recent riots. – Mari-Lou A Apr 11 '17 at 10:01
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    @Mari-LouA That the postmodification of nouns with adverbs is very rare is not in dispute. So any Google searcher would expect the post-modification of a noun by an adverb to be far scarcer than that by an adjective. Here's an attested example for you "This behaviour is not unlike the many negative reactions recently* to the prospect of taxpayers' money being used to bail out the banking system.*" – Araucaria - Him Apr 11 '17 at 10:43
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    @Mari-Lou: Here's another one: To date the prices of scholarly books, despite rather rapid increases lately, have not gone up in proportion to other items, not even as much as have the prices of novels. But because it's very uncommon, pure lack of familiarity can make any given example seem slightly "odd" even to competent native speakers. I'm not certain, but I suspect I tend to find it more unusual when the adverbially modified noun is actually the subject of the main verb in an utterance. – FumbleFingers Apr 11 '17 at 12:02
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    So many upvotes for a word that no native English speaker would use – dennisdeems Apr 11 '17 at 20:53
  • @dennisdeems Are you saying that I'm not a native speaker? Or that Janus isn't? Or that the people who write the OED aren't? Or that These 8 pages of people aren't? And that all the people who wrote those posts are non-native speakers? Hmmm ... – Araucaria - Him Apr 11 '17 at 23:17
  • @Araucaria one-handed (as an adverb) is in more frequent use and is attested earlier. One-handedly sounds awkward to me; thankfully the preferable word is already an answer to this question further up. But you might make a note to this effect so as not to lead non-native speakers slightly astray. – Chris Le Sueur Apr 12 '17 at 16:11
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How can you lift an elephant using one hand?

is less ambiguous, but still someone may say he has never seen an elephant using a hand.

Using only one hand, how can you lift an elephant?

is unambiguous that the lifting must be done using only one hand.

One meaning of lift is

Raise (a person's spirits or confidence)

so if the elephant is feeling depressed perhaps offering it a bun, using one hand, may lift it.

davidlol
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As stated the sentence is ambiguous, to remove the ambiguity you could rewrite as:

How can you lift an elephant by using just one of your hands?

Gary
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Just one point that seems to be missing, so far.

The word hand would hardly be used to refer either to an elephant's legs, or paws,
(as far as my understanding - based chiefly on documentaries - goes).

So the question isn't so ambiguous, really, merely a joke, based on a falsely perceived ambiguity.

m.a.a.
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  • That’s precisely why you’ll never find an elephant with one hand. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 16:18
  • @JanusBahsJacquet So why assume that the question is meant like that? – m.a.a. Apr 10 '17 at 16:19
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    Nobody is assuming anything. The question here is how to phrase the question in question (too many questions) in a way that the alternative parsing is not possible. There’s no assumption that anyone will realistically interpret the original question in the way the punchline of the joke does. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 10 '17 at 16:24
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    The joke is, at first the listener is supposed to interpret the "hand" in the question as their own hand with which they are asked to lift an elephant. Then the joke-teller gives an answer with an absurd (although technically logical) interpretation of the question. The question appears to be asking how to phrase the "how can you" question without allowing some wiseacre to make this joke. – David K Apr 10 '17 at 16:26
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How can you single-handedly lift an elephant?

single-handedly definition retrieved from Cambridge Dictionary

Bill
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I'd go with the following, since it uses a subordinate clause to directly link the hand to you as the subject.

How can you, using only a single hand, lift an elephant?

Jon Story
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You need context or you need to rewrite it. If you had context we'd know what you meant. If you don't we guess, but probably because most folks know you can't pick up an elephant with one hand (see, I just did it again, but now there is context.) and probably because it is irrational to think you meant an elephant with one hand that someone wanted to pick up with some mode of effort, namely the talking human's one hand and not a single handed Olyphant, you don't know.

or,

Hey, see this elephant with one hand? How can I pick Dumbo up with one hand, over my head. Wait...Hey, see that deformed elephant with one foots? He needs someone to pick him up, so he can eat peanuts and alfalfa. I bet I can lift him up with one hand.

johnny
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How can you, with one hand, lift an elephant.

Moving the phrase changes the ambiguity. You could respond that you have more than one hand, but that's a weak argument.

Robert Benson
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