Spysweeper is a program on our laptop that scans the disk, finds Bad Files and presents them for your inspection. The list of Bad Files appears and under it is a button that says Quarantine Selected. You are supposed to click that button to quarantine them. When this happens I have been annoyed because until I clicked the button I hadn’t made the choice to quarantine them.
The other day I realized that the phrase on the button was meant to say “Quarantine the selected files”, not “You have selected quarantine”. So I decided that the author of that program was a native speaker of a Slavic language. Slavic languages use participles that way. So do some Western European languages but a native speaker of one of them would probably write “Quarantine the selected”, still not idiomatic but not confusing.
Any time you want a linguistic puzzle detected, just ask me.
Of course, I have no evidence that I was correct…
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I’ve got a slight counter-argument to your analysis:
I’m a 20-something american, born and raised native english speaker.
I defaulted to the “slavic” interpretation and had to reread what you said several times before finally divined just how you may have originally interpreted it ( that’s how foreign your default take was to the way I assimilated the button ).
Here’s why I think that is:
Due to my demographic and background my mind instinctively categorized any text on a button to be something I do, and so consideration of the text being an indication of state never entered my cognitive process until I labored to understand your perception.
And so I would not at all allow the conclusion that the developer is Slavic since I too am a developer and would have made the same word selection based on an “economy of words” and “context makes it evident” arguments.
Disclaimer: I am ignorant as to your age and demographic, perhaps I too am assuming that my mindset is a result of such.
Since I am over 70, I suspect that you have uncovered a change in the English language. I have always been interested in such things but I completely missed this one. Thanks.
I agree with Josh. I don’t think there is a change in the language. While your interpretation would be the most natural one absent context, it’s simply inconceivable that the text of a button would convey information. It can only describe what will happen if you press the button. Then “quarantine selected” is just standard sign-ese for “quarantine the selected files”.
Here is something similar. Imagine a sewing contraption with a lever that releases a piece of cloth if you pull it. You can then imagine a little label on the lever saying “drop cloth”. You can further imagine someone being very confused that someone would label the lever as a drop cloth, when it is clearly nothing of the sort, but then coming to the conclusion that the maker must have been Slavic because a native speaker would have made a label that said “drop the cloth”.