Cut the red and blue wires

Which wires did you cut?

Maybe this would’ve been clearer if I’d chosen one of these for the title:

Tranĉu la ruĝan kaj bluan dratojn

Tranĉu la ruĝajn kaj bluajn dratojn

I noticed an interesting post on the lernu.net forums concerning a similar ambiguity concerning beach flags. So of course I ambled on over to the PMEG for some advice.

I had never thought of using the a(n) and aj(n) (singular and plural adjective endings) as tools to reduce ambiguity in this way; I thought it was pretty damn cool! In particular, I hadn’t considered using singular adjectives to refer to plural nouns like that.

As I understand it, the singular endings in the first example imply that we are talking about a blue wire and a red wire. But the plural endings in the second example imply that we’re probably talking about several red ‘n’ blue wires (because each of the red and blue adjectives apply to all wires)!

Though I do wonder whether the second example could potentially technically refer to all of them…