Be Brief and Vague! And how Bidirectional Optimality Theory allows for Verbosity and Precision.1 Manfred Krifka 1. The Sad Story of the Metric System in America Given the beginnings of the United States of America, its sympathy with the French revolution and its rationalist attitude towards the institu-tions of society, one would have expected that it would have been one of the first nations to adopt the new metric system that was introduced in France in 1800. But the history of the attempts to do so is decidedly mixed. American Congress authorized the use of the metric system in 1866. In 1959, American measurements were defined in relation to the metric system. In 1968, the government ordered a study which was pub-lished three years later under the title “A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come”. The year 1975 then saw the Metric Conver-sion Act, leading to the establishment of the US Metric Board. Amended in 1988, it resulted in the Metric Program, an organization founded to support the various federal agencies, which are required since 1991 to file an annual report on their efforts to change to the met-ric system. In spite of all these attempts, the United States of America are still the one major industrial nation that does not use the metric system as the predominant one. To this day, American schoolchildren have to count with miles that contain 1760 yards, yards that contain 3 feet, and feet that contain 12 inches. They have to memorize that an acre is 4840 square yards, and that a gallon contains 231 cubic inches. The costs of this are undoubtedly huge – they include, for example, the Mars mission of 1998 that failed because measurements were converted wrongly. Still, the general attitude of the American public towards the metric system is largely negative. There are websites with telling addresses like430Manfred Krifka www.metricsucks.com, and it is not uncommon that common people suspect a secret communist, catholic or Jewish plot behind the attempts to go metric. Why did the metric system not catch on? There are many reasons2. But one that cannot be taken lightly is that certain well-intended public relation attempts intended to familiarize the American people with the metric system just did not work. Since the Metric Conversion Act, road distances in National Parks are often given in miles and kilometers. And since then, travelers encounter signs like the following one: (1) Eagle Pass 7 miles 11.265 km It is not hard to see why road signs like (1) suggest that the metric system is something for intellectuals, or “rocket scientists”, far too un-wieldy for everyday purposes. 2. Problems with precision The problem with (1) leads us to the question: How much precision is enough? When can we stop being precise, relax and be a little vague? I won’t have much to say about this in general, but I will have to say something about the relation of precision level and linguistic form. Assume that the distance between Amsterdam and Vienna, measured as usual from city border to city border along the shortest connecting road path, is 965 kilometers. Now consider the following examples: (2) A: The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is one thousand kilometers. B: #No, you’re wrong, it’s nine hundred sixty-five kilometers. B’s reaction strikes us as inadequate; what he says is true but pedan-tic. But not so in the following exchange, where A’s utterance is actu-ally closer to the truth.Be Brief and Vague! 431 (3) A: The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is nine hundred seventy-two kilometers. B: No, you’re wrong, it’s nine hundred sixty-five kilometers. The road sign example (1) showed that the phenomena to be talked about here constitute a problem for translation. And indeed, if we trans-late (2) into the American measurement system, the oddness of the ex-change vanishes (one has to know that 600 miles are 965 kilometers, and 621 miles are 1000 kilometers). (4) A: The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is six hundred and twenty-one miles. B: No, it’s six hundred miles. It is quite obvious that the oddness of (2) cannot simply be stated in terms of truth conditions. Otherwise, the following exchange should be odd as well, but it isn’t (if we disregard the fact that it is odd to render the distance of two cities with a precision of ±50 meters in the first place!). (5) A: The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is one thousand point zero kilometers. B: No, you’re wrong, it’s nine hundred sixty-five kilometers. Examples like (2) can be multiplied at will. Consider the following: (6) A: The number π is 3.14159. B: #No, it’s 3.1415926535. (7) A: The number π is 3.1415926534. B: No, it’s 3.1415926535. Clearly, the reaction of B in (6) is pedantic, but it is not pedantic in (7). The first generalization that we can draw from examples (2) to (7) is that one should not increase the level of precision that was set by the first speaker. To say that the distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is one thousand kilometers sets the level of precision to ±50 km. The speaker indicates with the choice of words that the only distance values that should be mentioned are 800 km, 900 km, 1000 km, 1100 km, and so on. Changing this level in the reaction is pedantic. Similarly, to say that the value of π is 3.14159 sets the level of precision to 5 decimal432Manfred Krifka points; again changing this level is pedantic. If the first speaker starts out with a higher level of precision, as in (3), (5) or (7), the reactions of the second speaker at the same level are not considered pedantic. The translation problems we encountered with (1) and (5) show that the level of precision does not translate under a “precise” translation of terms. A better translation of 7 miles into the metric system would have been 11 kilometers, and there is no conceivable translation of (2) into mile measurements that would preserve the oddity of the exchange. The precision level of an expression can be marked explicitly by modifiers like roughly or exactly. We virtually have to employ exactly or precisely if we want to have a round number understood in a precise way: (8) The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is exactly one thou-sand kilometers. We can also use these modifiers to support an interpretation that an expression would have had anyway: (9) a. The distance between Amsterdam and Vienna is exactly nine hundred sixty five kilometers. b. The