LONG GONE

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.

What’s so funny about this? OK, the first question I need to ask you is: does this sentence make any sense? Of course the answer is yes and no. It’s what’s known as a “garden path” sentence in that it leads you in one direction and you end up nowhere. Sometimes these sentences are quite long, but this one is a shorty. It starts out talking about some guy who hunts ducks. OK, so far so good, everything makes sense. But then you read “out on weekends”. What the heck does that mean? “Out” is a preposition of location, but a weekend is not a location, it’s a timespan, namely of two days, Saturday and Sunday. So what happened? We were misled because what’s missing is a simple little comma. In fact this sentence is not about a man who hunts ducks in particular. Rather, it’s about a man who hunts. That’s all. What he does is “duck out.” This is a phrasal expression, meaning to slip or go away unseen by others. So if we add the comma after the word “hu