trois lapins to inaugurate the little month of February (which stretches this year to 29 days), beginning unfortunately in these parts in cold rains that will last for a week, and (this morning) in low air pressure that makes my joints so painful that I can barely get this posting typed and has depressed my vital signs (blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature) so much that I’m light-headed, unsteady on my feet, and muzzy-minded (the upside is that low air pressure inevitably goes on to rise, so that if I can hang on a while things will get better)
But I’m not dead yet, and (for reasons I don’t understand) I’m not at all depressed — low air pressure often causes me to break into weeping in despair at the slightest provocation, and the unbroken gloom of these days would test anyone — just pissed off at being so incapacitated.
My morning has been cheered by today’s Rhymes With Orange comic strip (involving a talking pet fish and its keeper), which plays in a surprising way with two of the many verb senses of see:
Minimal lexicographic facts about the senses of see involved in this strip, from NOAD:
verb see: 1 [a] perceive with the eyes; discern visually … 4 [a] meet (someone one knows) socially or by chance … [c] meet regularly as a boyfriend or girlfriend
On hearing “You’ve been seeing other fish”, most people would understand it to be conveying sense 4c (for reasons I’ll explore below); what’s funny is that the strip sets things up — via three pieces of evidence that the keeper has just been to an aquarium, a place people go to to watch fish — so that we will take the fish to be using the unexpected sense 1a: surprise!
Sense 4c. Note the crucial adverb regularly in the definition ‘meet regularly as a boyfriend or girlfriend’: this sense of the verb denotes repeated occurrences of an event (of meeting as a boyfriend or girlfriend). As a result, it will occur most naturally in the progressive aspect:
✓ I’m seeing Joe Blow these days; he’s a great boyfriend BUT NEEDING CONTEXTUALIZATION: ? I see Joe Blow these days; he’s a great boyfriend
This is the usage in the cartoon, so we expect the fish to conveying sense 4c.
Note: it’s not impossible to use 4c see in the simple present or past, but such examples are hard to interpret without some context that supplies the sense of regular repetition:
I used to go out with Sam Ram, but now I see Joe Blow / After a few weeks of dating Sam Ram, I saw Joe Blow f0r one wonderful year
Sense 1a. Perception see denotes a state, so its most natural occurrences are in the simple tenses:
I see / saw Joe Blow in the photo
There are, however, a large number of specialized uses of stative verbs in the progressive. A sampling:
(reporting on an unfolding scene) You are seeing a scientific miracle
(consulting a plane schedule) I am flying to Manitoba at 5 am tomorrow
(hospital infectious disease report, on change in progress) We are seeing more and more Covid-19 in the South these days
With some context, You’ve been seeing other fish (like You are seeing other fish) can be understood as an unfolding-scene report (which is how the talking fish in the cartoon intends it). The keeper’s aquarium paraphernalia in the cartoon provides this context. But when you look the cartoon, you zero in on the text — you take in the background images, but don’t study the details — so what you get, more or less automatically, is 4c, the dating sense. Then when you try to integrate this with the image, whoops, you have to revise your understanding. And that provides the sense of surprise.