latent ambiguity

An ambiguity that is not obvious and is unlikely to be found while using reasonable care. For example, a third party contract that provides for a payment to be made to a charity, but two charities exist with the same name. Extrinsic evidence, if allowed, may be required to determine the correct interpretation of the ambiguity. However, if each party, in good faith interprets the ambiguity differently, the meeting of the minds necessary to create a valid contract is not present.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.

We saw her duck.

Roy Rogers: More hay, Trigger? Trigger: No thanks, Roy, I'm stuffed!

Pentagon Plans Swell Deficit (newspaper headline)

I can't recommend this book too highly.

"An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense: any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language. . . . "We call it ambiguous, I think, when we recognize that there could be a puzzle as to what the author meant, in that alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading. If a pun is quite obvious it would not be called ambiguous, because there is no room for puzzling. But if an irony is calculated to deceive a section of its readers, I think it would ordinarily be called ambiguous." (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1947)

"Leahy Wants FBI to Help Corrupt Iraqi Police Force" (headline at CNN.com, December 2006)

Prostitutes Appeal to Pope (newspaper headline)

Union Demands Increased Unemployment (newspaper headline)

"Thanks for dinner. Ive never seen potatoes cooked like that before." (Jonah Baldwin in the film Sleepless in Seattle, 1993)

"Quintilian uses amphibolia (III.vi.46) to mean 'ambiguity,' and tells us (Vii.ix.1) that its species are innumerable; among them, presumably, are Pun and Irony." (Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Univ. of California Press, 1991)

Pronunciation: am-big-YOU-it-tee Also Known As: amphibologia, amphibolia, semantic ambiguity, equivocation