1087: Cirith Ungol

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Image Text

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

Description

The comic here is a mash up between the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books and movies and the novel and movie Charlotte's Web.

The title Cirith Ungol is a reference to Lord of the Rings where Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee were led to Cirith Ungol by Gollum to the lair of the ancient spider Shelob.

And therefore in this comic, Frodo (by himself) is being led into the lair of the spider, Charlotte. We can tell by the "Some Pig" writing in the spider web on the lower right hand corner which is a direct reference to the story of Charlotte's Web, in which a spider named Charlotte writes the very same text in her web.

In the image text, syntactic ambiguity is a property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing.

The ambiguity of the sentence quoted is that the pig named Wilbur could have been saved by Charlotte from being slaughtered by someone or could have been saved by someone from being slaughtered by Charlotte. Another possibility of the ambiguity is that the author, E. B. White, was saved from being slaughtered by Charlotte.

Impact

This comic caused a minor edit war at that other wiki as a result.