On the way to LAX this morning, I noticed the signs on the 105 freeway which reserve the carpool lane for "cars with two or more people." This led me to muse on the following questions:

If a pregnant woman is driving and there are no other passengers in the car external to her own body, can she legitimately use the carpool lane? Would the explanation "I'm pregnant, and therefore there are two people in this car" be sufficient to save her from getting a ticket if a cop pulled her over? If she attempted to use this explanation, would she be required to produce any sort of proof of pregnancy- sonogram photos, for instance? If no proof is required, then a non-pregnant woman could just claim to be pregnant and thus avoid a ticket. (Not advocating this behavior, but just pointing out a potential flaw in the system.)

Then I started to think about the fact that the signs do not state that the requisite "two or more people" be humans. If there is, in fact, a personal (or perhaps I should say tripersonal) God who is in some real sense with me, it would seem to follow that I ought to be able to use the carpool lane even when there are no other human persons in my car with me. And let's not even get started on other non-human persons such as angels and demons.

Let me be very clear: I have never used the carpool lane while driving "by myself" (in the colloquial sense), and I do not intend to start doing so. I'm just reporting ramblings. I'm imagining scenarios in which I'm arguing with a traffic cop about the personhood of fetuses, God, angels, and/or demons. I'm imagining the cop's clinching argument to be something along the lines of "Whatever, lady, you know what the signs mean!" At which point I would a) get a ticket, b) be committed to a mental institution, or c) both.

And this leads me to reflect, once again, on the nature of human communication. It's so heavily based on intersubjective understandings, shared assumptions, the "you know what I meant" factors. As much as I love language, I usually find it inadequate and imprecise when I really think about it. A friend told me that my theoretical justifications for using the carpool lane break the spirit of the law, while not violating the letter. She may be right on that. But how on earth do we know what the "spirit of a law" is, if not through the letter?

Okay, I'll stop before this gets any nerdier. I'm so looking forward to taking semantics next summer. Christie, thanks again for driving me to the airport!

Here's a (non)hypothetical question for you, my philosophically inclined friends:

Amy and Dannah share an apartment (they have a third roommate named Sohye, but she's not involved in this particular story.) The girls have only one parking space inside of the apartment complex. They take turns using the inside parking spot and parking on the street, which is significantly further away from the apartment. Parking on the curb inside the apartment complex is prohibited. By prior agreement, Amy gets to use the inside parking spot on Tuesday nights.

One Tuesday at around 6pm, Dannah comes home and decides to park in the inside parking spot. She knows that Tuesday is Amy's turn, but she chooses to use the spot anyway because she'll only be home for about half an hour and she doesn't think that Amy will come home during that time. However, Amy does come home to find Dannah's car parked in the spot. Amy decides to park her car on the curb, knowing that this entails the risk of her car getting towed, because she's tired and her takeout dinner is getting cold. Dannah, coming out a few minutes later to go to work, notices Amy's car parked on the curb and resolves to remind Amy to move it; however, being characteristically absent-minded, Dannah forgets to remind Amy.

Sure enough, the next morning Amy discovers that her car has been towed. On the way to pick up the car, Dannah and Amy have a discussion about who is responsible to pay the $180 fee. Their respective positions are as follows:

- Dannah believes that she is responsible for paying the fee, since the entire chain of events leading up to the towing of the car began with her conscious decision to use the parking spot on a night when it wasn't her turn.
- Amy believes that her decision to park inside the complex was the direct cause of the towing and that Dannah's decision was only an indirect cause. Amy also contends that she has both taken the spot when it wasn't her turn and parked on the curb on other occasions and that the fact that she happened to get towed this time is only a matter of luck. Therefore, Amy feels responsible for paying the fee.
- Dannah contends that the idea of moral luck doesn't get her off the hook; in her opinion, the crucial fact of the matter is that if she hadn't chosen to take the spot when it wasn't her turn, the car wouldn't have gotten towed in the first place.

Discuss! What are the strengths and weaknesses of each argument? What are your thoughts?

This week a new Korean Deaf guy arrived here at SIL. I don't know his spoken name, so for the purpose of this entry I'll call him Blue-Eyes (he's the only Korean I've ever met with blue eyes). We were introduced a few days ago, and I told him that I'm hearing. Tonight was the first time we really had a conversation; I was hanging out with him and my hearing friend Julia and Kang-Suk, another Korean Deaf guy.

At one point both of the guys were looking away, so Julia and I were just signing with each other. Then Blue-Eyes looked back at us and asked me, "You're Deaf, right?" I said "No, I'm hearing." He was like "Really? You're hearing? I thought you were Deaf! Your signing is really good!"

If he were American Deaf, he would have been able to tell from my ASL that I'm hearing and not a native signer. But I was very flattered all the same