Can You Sigh Backward?

Management

Memphis Residence Inn Downtown

6141 Poplar Pike

Memphis, TN 38119-4707

To the management,

I recently enjoyed a stay at your hotel in the beautiful, though desolate, downtown Memphis. In general, I say bravo. I can hardly blame you for the fact that it snowed in Tennessee that week, or that the TV picture froze just as the soon-to-be bronze medalist began his mogul run, forcing me to hear but not see his show-stopping double-full twisting back flip.  You can hardly be blamed for miscommunications with the valets who all seemed to be off-duty or the quality of your bagels, which I imagine are never quite right more than 100 miles from New York.

As a brief aside however, I would like to call your attention to the letter you posted on my refrigerator and the style with which it was written. The letter was a hospitable gesture, to be sure. I would simply like to inform you that neither was it in German nor Elizabethan English. You used the article “the” rather than “der”, “das” or “die”, and made note of such modern items as microwave popcorn and telephones. The language thus being established as American English, I am confused as to why you thought it necessary to capitalize common nouns. To my imperfect memory, you wrote “Bathroom”, “Snack”, and “Breakfast” as though they were proper nouns, implying they were either people (which would make the letter highly inappropriate) or elevated concepts (making the letter a new foray into the field of Snack Philosophy). I doubt this was your intention. I trust you found my proofread copy of the letter in my room and I suggest you make the changes outlined therein.

 However, the main purpose of my letter, and the element to which I hope you will respond is the sign posted in my room advising me of the hotel’s no smoking policy. I’m all for a no smoking policy, but the sign didn’t ask me to refrain from smoking. It didn’t ask me not to light up or to keep the air clean. It asked me whether I could sigh backward (see the photo enclosed).

I’ve done everything I can think of to decode this enigmatic question. According to Merriam Webster, to sigh is “to take a deep audible breath”, characterized by both an inhalation and an exhalation. One possible sense of sighing backward would be to take a breath in reverse, exhaling and then inhaling. This does not seem to have any relation to not smoking in the hotel (though perhaps it could relate to lung strength, which is degraded by chronic smoking, but not by smoking inside a hotel). You could consider the most emphatic part of sigh to be the exhalation and thus sighing backwards to be a single loud inhalation, but still it seems irrelevant. I then considered the possibility of a trick question, but “Can you sigh” backwards is “hgis uoy nac”. That’s incoherent in any language and the acronyms are toally unrelated. (HGIS: Hypermedia Geographical Information Systems, UOY: University of York, and NAC: Network Access Control). Phonetically backwards it sounds like “Ice Ooh Yunack”, still not a statement with any meaning whatsoever. Next I tried looking at the words in mirror-image, which as you might expect, yielded no insights.

I think some of the confusion stems from the fact that you have asked a question as a way of introducing a policy. Is the sign mean to be a dialogue, in which the answer to “Can you sigh backward?” is “We have a smoke free policy”? Or is it a question directed at me, the reader, asking whether I am capable of sighing backwards, asking whether I am allowed to sigh backwards, or asking me to please sigh backwards?

I leave my vain search for answers here, with the hope that you can enlighten me with the delightfully simple yet witty explanation for the sign. I can only anticipate kicking myself with shame for not figuring it out on my own.

All the best,

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