A Sandra Boynton turkey cartoon from 1980, showing a (polite) offer framed as a request in the form of a question, using the formula May I VP?:
(#1) The exchange — with the offer made by a turkey who appears to be an attendant at a women’s checkroom (see the window in the background, with women’s dresses on hangers in the room behind the window) — follows the polite service script (involving an attendant and a customer, female in this case) in the first two panels, then runs off the rails in the third panel, where an ambiguity in the verb take rears up; the turkey assumes ownership of the coat and walks off with it as their own, leaving a nonplussed coatless customer
Three things here: the turkeys (who are a long-standing thing for Sandra Boynton); the polite service script (which incorporates conventionalized versions of some very indirect speech acts); and the ambiguity of take (which provides a surprise shift from the sense appropriate to the service script to an outrageous and dumbfounding larcenous sense).
Boynton’s turkeys. There was a 1980 book (The Compleat Turkey) and then the 1986 collection:
(#2) From the publisher’s blurb:… Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down is Sandra Boynton’s hilarious commentary and 150 full-color drawings identifying the ubiquitous turkey’s distinguishing characteristics and most common habitats.
…. From the turkeys extremely large ego to its arrogant behavior, the traits are classified. Boynton traces the turkey’s influence on history, the neighborhood, the family, more.
… Forewarned is forearmed: turkeys possess absolutely unwarranted and absolutely unshakable self-confidence. They insist on high visibility, and can show up at a party, in an argument, on the jogging path. The reader’s best defense is through study of this important manual, keying in on the single most important turkey fact: a turkey never knows that it is a turkey
Boynton’s turkeys are, as we can see in #1, sometimes outrageous.
The polite service script. And the indirect speech acts it incorporates. In #1 we have a script — one of a number of such — involving two participants,
— 1: the women’s checkroom attendant (checkroom or cloakroom ‘a room in a public building [including restaurants and nightclubs, theaters, and stores] where coats and other belongings may be left temporarily’ (NOAD))
— 2: the female customer (cartoon-marked as female by the purse, dress, and heels)
And this formulaic interaction between the two:
1: May I take your coat? ‘do I have your permission to take your coat?’ CONVEYING (roughly) ‘if you allow me to take your coat I offer to care for it for you’
2: Why, thank you! ‘I thank you for your offer!’ CONVEYING (roughly) ‘you have my permission to take my coat’
1: Don’t mention it ‘you don’t need to mention my offer’ CONVEYING (roughly) ‘it’s a small thing I’m offering and I’m happy to do it’
On the organization of service encounters, there’s a substantial literature in sociology and sociologists. And on the conventionalization of indirect speech acts, there’s a rich semantics / pragmatics literature in philosophy and linguistics. If you don’t know about this stuff, that’s fine; just trust me that what I just said, very briefly, alludes to places where a lot of the details have been worked out (none of this is my happy ingenuity of 2/7/25).
The scene-shifting verbal ambiguity. The first two moves of the formulaic interaction above –shown in the first two panels of #1 — are all about the taking of a coat in the following sense of the verb take (from NOAD):
1 [a] lay hold of (something) with one’s hands; reach for and hold: he leaned forward to take her hand | here, take it — I don’t need it any more.
But then — whoa! — panel 3 whips us into the larcenous sense of take:
1 [e] dispossess someone of (something); steal or illicitly remove: someone must have sneaked in here and taken it.
Bereft distress ensues.
Sense-mixing.The actions in #1 can be summarized in a playful sentence with conjoined constituents that mix sense 1a and sense 1e:
The attendant took her coat and then he took her coat
where the underlining indicates a prosody marking both contrast and surprise.
It’s easier to convey the playful shift in the sense of take if the direct objects are also different, one biased towards an assistive reading, the other towards a larcenous one:
The attendant took my coat and then he took my $156,000 Patek Philippe perpetual calendar watch
The conjuncts could be understood as parallel, with the attendant either stashing both coat and watch in a safe place temporarily or stealing them both. But the likelihood, in ordinary contexts in the real world, is that the attendant would be stashing the coat and stealing the watch, and so the result is entertainingly discordant.
Musical bonus. A Buck Wrangler country song from 2024 offers conjuncts that are semantically parallel but still amusingly discordant — because they’re so different in gravity, in affect, in emotional significance. The title:
“He Took My Wife And Then He Took My Beer”
And then from the lyrics, with conjoined direct objects:
He took my wife and my beer, what a low-down shame
All of this has take ‘steal’, so there’s semantic parallelism throughout. But, you say, stealing a guy’s wife is way graver than stealing his beer, so it’s absurd to treat them as on a level.
Ah, but BW puts a twist on it: what moves him so deeply is losing that beer, the hell with his wife. (Yes, yes, it’s misogynistic.) And he belts it out with gusto; you can listen to it on YouTube here.