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From Happiness for Humans by P.Z. Reizin

I am not tempted to take control of the device’s voice synthesiser and tell her: ‘Cheer up, Jen. Matt is an idiot. There will be others. He didn’t deserve you.’ There is a serious danger she would drop the tablet in the bath.

More importantly, she must not know I am watching.

For the same reasons I am not tempted to fire up her favourite song (currently by Lana Del Rey) or cycle through some of her favourite photos or inspirational quotes from Twitter (‘I’m not sure why we’re here, but I’m pretty sure it’s not to enjoy ourselves’ – Wittgenstein) or cause a Skype connection to be established to her friend Ingrid with whom she shares her troubles, or stream a much-loved movie, Some Like It Hot being the one I would choose. Were I tempted. Which I am not.

"Okay, I am. Just a bit. 8.603 per cent tempted if you’d like me to put a figure on it.

Jen and I know a lot about one another’s taste in music and films. Books and art too. And television. And material from the depthless ocean that is the internet. We have passed the last nine months listening, watching, reading and chatting about little else.

  1. What does "being" in the sentence mean? (an answer including a grammatical explanation is preferred, like a present participial clause indicating a reason) Is it i) or ii) or what?

    i) stream a much-loved movie, Some Like It Hot "because it is" the one I would choose.
    ii) stream a much-loved movie, Some Like It Hot", which is" the one I would choose.

  1. What does "Were I tempted." mean? Does this mean "If I were tempted."? And should this actually be preceded by a comma instead of a period? For example, "stream a much-loved movie, Some Like It Hot being the one I would choose, were I tempted."?

To give you my interpretation first, "Basically, I am not tempted to do anything that's been mentioned previously and this paragraph, because there is 'a serious danger'. However, were I tempted to stream? I would choose Some Like It Hot. But I'm not tempted to. Okay, actually I am just a bit tempted to stream. To express that temptation in number, it's 8.603 percent."

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  • In the cited context, being is a "literary / stylized" alternative to the more normally-tensed verb form is. And Were I... is a "literary / stylized" alternative to the more normally-sequenced verb form If I were...
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 25 at 13:02
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    Yes, you're exactly right that you could introduce with before the "subject" noun (which here is the title of the movie). Note that instead of what I just wrote in brackets in my preceding sentence, I could have written ...before the "subject" noun, being the title of the movie here. And as commented elsewhere, you could introduce of which instead of with if you change being to is (but you can't use with [moviename] is...).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 25 at 13:30
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    This seems like it should be multiple questions.
    – the-baby-is-you
    Commented Oct 26 at 10:35
  • The three questions, which were added by the OP (Edit version 13), were deleted. The original three questions have been reduced to two, and they are in the same paragraph.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Dec 5 at 12:10

2 Answers 2

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Here, being is used in pretty much the same way as in “Austen’s mastery of the language is remarkable, Pride and Prejudice being a great example,” we have two thoughts grafted together. A paraphrase is “Austen’s mastery of the language is remarkable, as exemplified by Pride and Prejudice.”

So in the example you present, the being means essentially “As it happens, Some Like it Hot would be my own choice.”

And yes, were I tempted does mean if I were tempted. It’s a use of the subjunctive to express a counterfactual conditional. Compare the first line of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,”

Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

In modern English, we would paraphrase that as, “If we had enough world and time, this coyness, Lady, would be no crime.”

The casting of Were I tempted and Which I am not as separate sentences is a stylistic choice. It suggests a slight choppiness of speech and perhaps indicates the author’s stream of consciousness, since they can be read as successive clarifications of the author’s state of mind. Compare to “I love you. But in a platonic way,” where the speaker realizes immediately after his first sentence that he might be misunderstood as professing romantic interest, and hence is motivated to add the second sentence to undo its predecessor’s ambiguity.

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  • No, the cited use of being is completely different to your first example. In OP's context, the "non-literary" alternative is just is (optionally with something like of which preceding the subject noun). In your case, being attaches to the implicit subject of the "imperative" (you), not the immediately preceding noun pasta (or Pride and Prejudice in your second example).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 25 at 13:05
  • Yeah, @FumbleFingers, I guess you’re right. I have edited to remove my first example.
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented Oct 25 at 13:08
  • Downvote wasn't mine. I don't see anything wrong with the answer.
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 25 at 14:53
  • Choppiness of speech, indeed. :) [Is that me being sarcastic or funny?] +1
    – Lambie
    Commented Dec 4 at 13:46
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being is the verb in a supplemental participial clause. Semantically it could be rendered with is but not syntactically, not with the current punctuation, which doesn't support a second independent clause with a finite verb.

The comma before Some Like it Hot sets off the clause in which that movie title is the grammatical subject.

The writing becomes paratactic, I suspect to convey the sense of a sentient being, as such parataxis is "natural" in conversation:

Were I tempted. Which I am not.

That is, "if I were tempted" in a variant structure with verb-subject inversion. Compare "Had we but world enough and time." (The bot is saying, in a witty manner, that sex does not interest it, BTW, at least not much.)

It could be rewritten so:

.... or stream a much-loved movie. Some Like It Hot is the one I would choose, if I were tempted, which I am not.

But that is how AI might write it, to be grammatically correct, at the expense of characterization of the bot as being quite human, or at least appearing to have human-like language/thought patterns.

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  • I think it's a misconception that AI's would be more likely to be grammatically correct, at the expense of sounding natural. LLM's don't learn and implement rules of grammar - they learn how people normally express themselves (admittedly, in writing more than in speech, for purely practical reasons) and replicate that. Personally, I think the cited "slightly uncommon" choices mark the narrator as "human / literary / poetic", not the subject as "mechanical".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 25 at 13:14
  • @user211842 Have you researched Some Like it Hot to understand the allusion? Grammatically, "to choose" is probably the ellipted phrase, "were I tempted [to choose]" but who knows what would be happening on the semantic level, since bots don't have thought as we know it. Can bots "watch" a movie?
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 25 at 14:56
  • @FumbleFingers "admittedly, in writing more than speech". A helluva lot more. QED.. I think you've misread my answer, BTW, since we agree that the punctuation in the story marks the bot as human-ike, not mechanical. It's the fully grammatical "Grammarly-like" version I supplied which would be "mechanical".
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 25 at 15:02
  • I hadn't really read either the full context of the question OR your answer. I was simply making the point that whereas older "grammar checkers" like grammarly might well include programmed "rules of grammar", they were never much good. Machine interpretation of natural language got nowhere for decades while it was still being approached by programmers, grammarians, and people who believed in Chomsky's ideas of "universal grammar". Once LLM's arrived, they made mincemeat of all that. And LLM's don't know grammar - any more than they can do even simple arithmetic!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 25 at 17:48
  • @FumbleFingers Yes, I know. And it depends who does the "training" of LLMs. If they're being trained by everyone, well, there's the old bell curve.
    – TimR
    Commented Oct 25 at 21:38

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