Comment by mapontosevenths

> Although the sentence is itself a bit awkward and strange on its own, and really needs context.

Absolutely, but in this case and in many others we just don't have that kind of context. So we do what comes naturally and make assumptions based on past experience. We assume that the most frequently encountered form of it is the right one. From one perspective it can be said that LLM's are doing the same.

It's interesting to note that jokes are absolutely riddled with confusing and syntactically vague language like this. If you're ever looking for a good NLP test find some children's joke books. Those old dad jokes are mostly just about the vagaries of the English language and how easily you can be surprised when the "solution" to a sentence is not the most common one.