I was walking down the street with Oldest Boy on Saturday. I wanted to tell him about a book.
“I’m reading this book right now…” I started.
He looked at me, and said “No, you’re not.”
Pesty boy.
One well-deserved noogie later, I said, “Well, no, not right now. But about now.”
Temporal expressions have an interesting way of spreading out if we’re not careful. I grabbed some samples from the BNC, and found that ‘right now’ could mean a number of things including:
- this precise moment in time
- I want an answer, right now!
- You have to decide, right now, do you want to go to the hospital or stay…
- at this general time, including now, but perhaps a bit on either side of now
- …right now large multi-national companies are clearing vast areas of that forest…
- There’s a lot of organized suffering in England right now.” Petulancy is Morrissey’s forte:
- and even narrated past (!)
- The only thing he wanted right now was to go back to Jubilee Wood.
- …but she was too shattered right now…
- Tony and I shared the navigation seat, and right now I was in the back…
So there’s some slop if we need it. It sure makes a problem for computational linguists though. You have to have some idea of what’s intended if you want to pin down exactly when ‘right now’ is.
Time expressions have other interesting features. You can use them in place of other things like distance:
“How far it is to town?”
“About 10 minutes that-a-way.”
but not the converse:
“How long was that movie?”
“A mile.”
But I don’t think I’ll elaborate on that right now.
3 July 2006 at 5:16 pm
The same can be said of alcohol cunsumption in North Idaho.
How far is it to that town?
Its about a three beer drive.
3 July 2006 at 10:29 pm
So what would a computational linguist make of this:
4 July 2006 at 2:08 am
That’s interesting. It reminds me of when people say they need to ‘get a life’. Whereas it used to be that a life was just something you already had. I think it was Douglas Coupland who pointed that out.
Hey, beer could stand in for distance or time.
‘It’s a three-beer drive.’
‘It’s a three-beer movie.’
So beer is more fungible than time. I’ll have to make a paper out of that.
I never did Do the North Idaho, and my life was not significantly diminished.
5 July 2006 at 2:49 pm
As a matter of fact your life may be richer for not having Done the North Idaho…same can be said of southern Idaho as well.
Although I must say that meating liberals who live in north Idaho has been a learning experiance, soldiers behind enemy lines and all.