jokesmeaning
This is a joke from the TV series "Friends".
— Can I borrow this? My milk's gone bad.
— I hate that. I once had a thing of half-and-half. Stole my car.
I'm thinking that it has something to do with the ambiguity of "gone bad", but I don't understand what "I once had a thing of half-and-half" means.
I was intrigued by the "adjective ladder" data in a writeup by Hicks et al. cited by a linked answer to a related question in the comments, but I wanted to see it as a graph with error bars to help me gauge similarity and variance. I've plotted it below.
I recommend choosing just a handful of these key terms from this chart whose error bars are well separated from each other with somewhat similar distance between them. Perhaps:
The study has its own similar list of eleven items (abysmal, awful, bad, poor, mediocre, fair, good, great, excellent, amazing, phenomenal). Choosing a subset of six of those would simply entail taking every other: abysmal, bad, mediocre, good, excellent, phenomenal). For five, remove either abysmal or phenomenal.
Be careful not to pick terms that are too obscure! "Abysmal" and "Middling" just aren't popular words. (Though note that popularity is not the same as familiarity.) Consider checking Google Ngrams. Here are the most obscure words out of the 24 on the list (since WWII):
Fewest occurrences in printed books (via Google Ngrams):
This paper had good methodology, randomizing the list, asking subjects to sort it, then rate it, and a few other tasks the helped them determine subjects' familiarity with each term. They found that "middling" was left blank by most participants, presumably due to a lack of familiarity.
When choosing words, try to avoid the less popular ones (like "middling"). I'd like to see "dismal," "average," and "heroic" in there as well, but keep the list from growing too large.
A larger version of this study could be broken down by region and educational level. If using something like Amazon Mechanical Turk, I suggest restricting participants to regions where English is the primary language rather than the lingua franca.
NP₁ have NP₂ Infinitive VP is a causative construction.
(Note there is no to on the infinitive in this construction)
This construction means that NP₁ causes NP₂ to do whatever the infinitive Verb Phrase is.
So if the sentence is
the meaning is that I arranged for him to pick me up at school today in some (unspecified) way.
And if it's
the speaker is committing to arranging for someone to fix their car.
Tomorrow can modify either will have (tomorrow is the day to arrange it), or it can
modify fix (tomorrow is the day to fix the car). This is what's called an "attachment ambiguity".
Best Answer
Half and half is a mixture of half milk and half cream.
I would say that the joke (as you believe) is
Not a particularly good joke, edit (though now I think I remember it from Friends, I think the delivery would have saved it. Chandler, if I am not wrong)