I am reading a book and the following phrase left me flabbergasted!
She pulled back her fingers a second before they were sliced off. [1]
Does it mean that her fingers were sliced off a few seconds after she pulled them back? Or did she avoid that horrible fate by pulling them back?
How would one differentiate these two meanings (except by using the context)?
Edit: I did not specify the next part, because I wanted unbiased answers. The latter are satisfying and the next part is:
Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped against the
ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed under it.
[1] from Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Best Answer
The one thing that seems to be agreed by the answers so far is that the intended meaning is obvious: she pulled back her hand seconds before her fingers (to use questioner’s own word) could be sliced off.
The word could in this context has counterfactual force.
It has been pointed out that the same grammatical structure can transform the semantics by the substitution of the word head for the word fingers. So there is a grammatical ambiguity. And it could be avoided by the substitution of the subjunctive could.
But wait a minute. Here is another example. A parent shouts at her/his child, shivering in an icy lake:
Nobody will imagine that the parent intends the child to get out of the water and then die of cold. Clearly there is a well-established preventative usage of before in addition to the temporal one.
So should the writer go the extra mile and prevent any possible ambiguity by inserting could?
No. The whole point of the situation is surely to emphasise how close she came to losing her fingers. That is done by using the original words and so rendering the tense moment as vivid as possible.
So the sentence is grammatically ambiguous but contextually clear and in literary terms justified.