(click to enlarge)
The first bumper sticker almost (almost) works as one of those paradoxes like "This statement is false," but what it's much more like is one of those T-shirts women are invited to wear that have writing over the breasts chastising people for looking at their (the women's)* breasts—the joke being (I mean, I assume it's supposed to be a joke—it is, right?) that the writing draws your eyes somewhere it then attacks you for looking.
In fact the main difference I can see between the breasts T-shirt and the "Watch The Road" bumper sticker—which by the way the The shouldn't be capitalized, but whatever—is that I'm not as sure the "Watch The Road" bumper sticker is meant to be a joke. So it's like, "Hey, you, look over here and read this [by the way not especially large-print] reminder not to read bumper stickers while driving."
But honestly I still might not have cared if it weren't for the second bumper sticker. The second bumper sticker is written with evidently no regard for who might be reading it at what distance. Look at that goddamned font size! I took this picture while stopped directly behind it at a traffic light, and I imagine you'll have to click to enlarge if you really want to read it. Essentially you can't read that bumper sticker while driving behind that car at anything even remotely close to a safe following distance, and you certainly can't read it while watching the road. Thought, effort, and squinting have to go into it. I assume the person who designed the sticker held it in his or her hands and was like, "Looks great!"—forgetting where it goes. (Maybe he or she imagined it on one of those postcard-style spinning bumper-sticker racks?)
One thing I can tell you for sure: these bumper stickers sure distracted me. This car—with CA EXEMPT plates, I should have mentioned already—ought to have a third bumper sticker between the first two, with arrows pointing out, reading,
DON'T
READ
* This parenthetical is very David Foster Wallace—stylistically/mechanically/grammatically, I'm saying. Does anyone else do that shit?
2 comments:
Yes, I do that (explain pronouns in parentheticals).
I think it was primarily an IJ joke, though, part of DFW's running gag about militant grammarians, among whom I imagine a primary complaint is that of hanging modifiers.
Your example is slightly more practical and necessary than a DFW deployment. If you went back in a DFW sentence* to find which pronoun was not acting, the transverse meaning would be humorous. In your example, without the parenthetical, the sentence would perhaps have, correctly interpreted, attributed the breasts as belonging to a statement, or a t-shirt, or the general American populace.
* In the case of IJ, given the back-and-forth nature of the book, this was likely the intended course of action.
Good point about DFW's usage: I'm not sure I remember that it was always set up so that the other reading would be explicitly humorous (at least no more than any pronoun snafu is going to be at least a little humorous), but it's certainly so that it was done for humorous effect.
The militant grammarian thing, though, was not merely a preoccupation of fictional characters: DFW himself cared a whole lot about grammar (see for example his review of Garner's amazing Dictionary of American Usage, originally in Harper's and then in I think maybe Consider the Lobster?).
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