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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