Monday, December 23, 2013

Pare a Pair of Pears

I noticed a linguistic curiosity today. No, it doesn't have to do with pears or paring them; it has to do with pairs.

We speak of a pair of gloves, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, even a pair of dice; and those are all clearly sets, or pairs, of two things.

But we also speak of a pair of pants, a pair of scissors, a pair of glasses—eyeglasses, that is. In these cases it's much less clear that we're dealing with two things. I do have a pair of kitchen scissors that separates into two parts--sometimes too readily—presumably for ease of cleaning. But these pairs are normally not two separable things. So why do we treat them, linguistically, as two? Maybe it is because they are sort of bifurcated. You could say that about a pair of pants, pretty clearly. And maybe scissors. But it might be stretching things a little bit to apply this theory of mine to glasses.

Well, people who study language (and I include myself here) come to recognize that you often can't apply "logic" to language. Any language is its own system, and it has very little regard for any external system such as what we call "logic."

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