For a moment my mind flashed and I imagined one of the Tenderloin brownstones (Ellis and Post-ish) whence a head sticks out the window because it has been awoken by an acrid, herbal smell and a powdery, cigarette-y, smell wafting in the open window and it bellows: “Get your weed and hookers out of here, some decent people have to go to work in the morning!”

Curiously, the other two listeners at the table had also been so aurally misdirected and, upon asking the raconteuse to clarify, much mirth ways had.^*

And here lies the problem in our English, we lack a way, both in speech and typographically, to limit the distribution of a concept across a conjunction. Case in point, and borrowing the C ternary operator structure:

the smell of (weed && hookers) ? “the smell of weed and the smell of hookers” : “(the smell of weed) and hookers”

Now, we at the table took the distribution to mean (the smell of weed) and (the smell of hookers), the first case in the statement above. We distributed (much like the power of distribution over multiplication) across the conjunction. The speaker intended, we discovered, the second case. The interesting problem is that there’s no way to limit this in spoken discourse without an appeal to some sort of visual aid, a gestural cue, or some implicit context.

The problem also appears in written discourse, however:

“the smell of weed and hookers”

To disambiguate we could try “the smell of weed, and hookers.” The “,” is unnecessary here. One could, make an appeal to including the serial comma as in (American) English writing as model: “Tom, Dick, and Harry” might suggest that “the smell of weed, and hookers” is acceptable, but that simply doesn’t scan right to me for a dyadic entity.

The only way I can get this to work is by appealing to computer science, which is naturally under a mandate to be very clear in the order in which statements are processed. “(The smell of weed) and hookers” winds up being very clear, but that’s certainly not standard English writing.

And lo, here is the problem again in the wild from The Sydney Morning Herald:

The same tests revealed that infected men were less intelligent and prone to novelty-seeking behaviour.

Here it’s less distributing across the and. Did that mean the infected men were “less intelligent” and “less prone to novelty-seeking behaviour,” or were they “(less intelligent) and (prone to novelty-seeking behaviour)?

I’m not sure what the right method for disambiguation is, or if it’s even desirable given the humor it can provide.

*: This was actually even funnier than this first transformation because once I disambiguated that it was “the smell of weed” and “hook_something_” I thought she meant “the smell of weed” and “hookahs”. But no, she meant as I originally mis-apprehended: the smell of weed STOP and hookers.

The first sentence should seem fairly pedestrian and intelligible..

“The sales associate, whose business card I have at home, did a great job showing the elegance and sophistication of Mac OS X”

In this statement, the clause in the appositive (the bit between commas) modifies the subject, “the sales associate”. Now we refer to people by “who” and object by “what” or “which”. Therefore “whose” is based off of “who” and corresponds to a statement about a person.

My question comes about when speaking in a parallel construction as the above about an inanimate object.

“The new server in the data center, ______ IP address I need, runs the elegant and fast Mac OS X.”

You see, I want to use “whose” in that slot, but a machine, even one that runs Mac OS X, is no person. Mice and I agreed that an alternative construction might be:

“The new server in the data center, the IP address of which I need, runs the elegant and fast Mac OS X”.

Yes, that works, but gets a bit clumsy. What oh what could be the word that goes in that slot?

Well, it turns out that it is: “whose”. The guidline of “who is for people, wha/that is for things” is, in the words of “Pirates of the Carribbean” more like a guideline.

Now let us ask, what part of speech and function is the underlined “whose”. Merriam-Webster says:

Main Entry: 1whose Pronunciation: ‘h?z, ?z Function: adjective Etymology: Middle English whos, genitive of who, what : of or relating to whom or which especially as possessor or possessors <whose gorgeous vesture heaps the ground — Robert Browning>, agent or agents <the law courts, whose decisions were important — F. L. Mott>, or object or objects of an action <the first poem whose publication he ever sanctioned — J. W. Krutch>

(emphasis mine)

There you have it: “of what anything (person / thing)” is expressed by “whose”.

Thus, to close the loop:

“The new server in the data center, whose IP address I need, runs the elegant and fast Mac OS X.”

Update:

In response to a comment I found a site which encourages the use of ‘whose’ to refer to inanimate objects. The author notes that doing so seems to be a shibboleth for good writers versus bad. [ LINK ]