On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:01:53 +0000, Tom Anderson wrote: > As Dave Hansen pointed out, "Harry smiled vaguely back", means that the > direction Harry was smiling was vaguely back - might have been a bit to > the side or something.
That's an extremely artificial interpretation of the sentence, even if it is grammatically possible. Who talks about smiling in a physical direction? Does anyone ever say "He smiled forward" or "She smiled north-by-north-east" or "She smiled to the side"? The only thing even close to what you're talking about is "He smiled out of the corner (or side) of his mouth" -- not the same thing at all. "Smiled vaguely back" is a clumsy construction, and any decent editor should change it to "smiled back vaguely" regardless of whether they are from the US or UK. But clumsy or not, you're really pushing the envelope to get the interpretation that he smiled in a direction which was vaguely back. Yes, the sentence "He smiled vaguely back" is grammatically ambiguous, but semantically can have only one meaning: he returned a smile, but his smile was vague. "He vaguely smiled back" suffers the same fate. It too can imply that the smile was vague, or that the smile was only vaguely in return. Both interpretations are grammatically possible, but the second is semantically dubious. A good editor from any country is supposed to weed out clumsy, confusing sentences like that, and replace them with the grammatically unambiguous equivalent "he smiled back vaguely". This isn't a localisation issue, it is a command of language issue. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
