Through the bathroom window

“She came in through the bathroom window” is a perfectly normal sentence, clear and correct, if we disregard the fact that this is probably not the most common way of entering a house. But the sentence is only clear because we, as hearers, co-operate with the speaker. We automatically supply some information that is never given, we automatically assume that she came in through the open bathroom window. Of course, ghosts are known to walk through windows, and everything is possible in dreams, fiction and fantasy, where average people can walk through windows. But in the sentence above we would normally assume that this is not the case. By the way: The sentence “She came in through the bathroom window” was also the title of a pop song, sung by a band which was popular long before most of you started listening to pop music, long before most of you were born, actually. I bet you don’t know which.

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