I said that he was being a jerk - but that’s another story. The argument fizzled out when we both recognized that we were fighting about an issue neither of us really understood. We needed to learn more. But as I tried to follow the story over the following months, I got more and more confused. Under Congress’s 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, were incandescents being banned or weren’t they? Every time I read a story that seemed to answer the question, the next story contradicted it; and the spat we’d had in our kitchen was happening now in Congress, with a new and ugly political spin.
I began to suspect that the issue wasn’t just the environment, or personal freedom versus government regulation. It was also writing - the story itself and the imprecise way it was being told.
Let’s start with adjectives. In newspapers and on websites, supporters of the 2007 law applauded the phasing out of “the inefficient [i.e. bad] incandescent bulb.’’ Opponents deplored the phasing out of “the traditional [i.e. good] incandescent bulb.’’ But writers on both sides were ignoring - or perhaps exploiting - the fact that the English language has an inherent ambiguity about whether an adjective is being used as a restrictive or non-restrictive modifier. When you write that “the inefficient incandescent light bulb is being phased out,’’ do you mean that all incandescent light bulbs are being phased out because they are inefficient? Or do you mean that among the universe of incandescent light bulbs only the inefficient ones are being phased out?
Again: Were incandescent bulbs disappearing or weren’t they?
Recently I’ve read a number of articles asserting that no, not all incandescent bulbs were being banned - only the inefficient ones. The new ones, featuring a new technology, were described as “halogen incandescents.’’ So maybe both versions of the story were correct. The traditional incandescent was about to disappear; but a new efficient incandescent would take its place.
