Here’s a sentence from a guy’s final project paper for a graduate science course at U.B.C.:

When computer
became more advanced and AI or detailed newer systems
emerged such as artificial neural networks and decision
models.

To stave off all the cryptoracists, this guy was born and raised in North America and would never be mistaken for anyone from another continent. Will you call this 35 year old “Doctor” when he is done?

All I can say is “How is Babby Formed”? Watch below to see how funny illiteracy can be.

Caveat Lector!

Sometimes there’s a jolly fellow in your office environs who delights in playing minor pranks on you. Then one day, he leaves for two weeks and the entire cubicle farm smiles a collective grin.

Witness one D__ L__. One of the few people who doesn’t like his desk cleaned by the nightly cleaning staff. He is also one of the few souls who doesn’t like more than one monitor. This makes the prank almost absurdly simple: pepper his desk with “This desk to be cleaned” signs and multiple monitors.

Day 1

“This desk to be cleaned” signs are gathered from around the office and strewn all over his desk. There is nary a rhyme or reason, with almost everyone chuckling and dumping a sign on the desk as they walk by.

Day 2

Another monitor appears and the signs start being stacked.

Day 4

A big monitor makes its appearance, the signs seem to have become lethargic and are just lying there.

Day 5

Another monitor appears and the signs are still on strike.

Day 6

Wow, major organization. Someone has stepped in and set the monitors up in a semblance of order. Each monitor has its own ‘Clean’ sign and the desk looks like someone might actually sit there. Also, the green frames have been dropped off by someone who inquires incredulously “Does someone ACTUALLY sit here?”. Me: “Yes, someone does. He just really wants his desk cleaned, that’s all.” She walks off, shaking her head.

Day 7

This is the piece de resistance. Someone has filched both an “Out of Order” sign and yellow “Caution” tape and stuck it on D__ L__’s desk. The masterpiece is ready for the return of the subject.

Day 9

Finally the day of reckoning arrives. Our subject has graciously decided to share his initial reaction with us, sans invective for the kiddies among us.

A prank well played, and even more sportingly received!

I’m not saying this is accurate where I work, but it very well could be. Quite funny and bang on!

Do you pity the man who dies, or the man who never lives? We all know which is harder.

Here’s the funniest sign we’ve seen in a while. Spot on and not sparing the satire!

Not only is the build-up immense, the punchline is as anticlimactic as the Obama presidency.

Having grown too old to ring the bell in the cathedral tower, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, ran an ad in the local newspaper for a replacement.

An armless man appeared at Quasimodo’s door, and the old ring-master asked him, “Are you here for the job of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am”

“But how can you ring the bell when you have no arms?”

“That’s easy. I may lack arms, but I possess an extremely tough skull. I simply run at the bell and strike it with my forehead. The tone produced is absolutely exquisite.”

“All right,” conceded Quasimodo and hired the fellow.

The man ascended the spiral staircase, climbed into the bell tower, ran to the bell, and struck it with his forehead, indeed making a lovely clang. Alas, though, the bell swung back pendularly, smashed into the poor chap, and knocked him out of the tower. He splatted on the cobblestoned far below.

When the police arrived at the scene, an officer asked, “Mr. Quasimodo, do you know this man?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Quasi. “He was an employee of mine.”

“For our records, please give us his name.”

Quasimodo furrowed his brow. “I don’t know his name, but his face rings a bell.”

Shortly thereafter, Quasimodo placed a second ad in the paper asking for new bell-ringing applicants. A second gentleman appeared who looked exactly like the first, including the state of armlessness.

Quasimodo asked the new man, “Are you here for the position of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am,” replied the second man.

“Then I have two questions for you. First, am I wrong or do you look exactly like another fellow who was recently in my employ and who came to a tragic end?”

“That man was my older brother,” replied the applicant. “Indeed, many people have remarked that I look just like him.”

“You look so much like him,” Quasimodo went on, “that you too lack arms. How do you propose to ring the bell?”

“Easy. Like my brother, I too have an exceeedingly tough forehead, which I use to ring the bell, but I am more agile than my brother, and I have learned to get out of the way of the bell’s backswing.”

“Fine,”sighed Quasimodo with relief. “You may start immediately.”

The second gentleman mounted the spiral staircase, climbed up to the tower, and ran headlong into the bell, producing as exquisite a tone as had his brother. As the bell swayed back toward him, he deftly stepped aside and avoided getting clobbered bythe return swing.

Alas, though, three nights later, the new bell ringer got stinking drunk. He staggered up the spiral staircase, lurched toward the bell, and struck it with his forehead. As he stood there swaying, the bell swung back and knocked him out of the tower and onto the cobblestones below.

Again the police arrived. “Do you know this man, Mr. Quasimodo?”

“Yes, he too was an employee of mine, ” answered the hunchback.

“May we have his name, please?”

“I don’t know his name either, but he’s a dead ringer for his brother”

This pun is good, but it demands too much perseverance. A pun’s fleeting beauty lies in its ephemeral understanding, the tacit knowledge that it is a wordplay that needs no deeper insight or thorough investigation. A two-part pun like this deserves little mercy, if any. Only the most avid logolepts would find this pun enjoyable. This joke is from The Miracle of Language, by Richard Lederer. Read it, stranger.

Just when you thought you knew some people who’re overly pedantic with their devotion to logorrheic minutiae, this guy comes along and sets the bar at a whole new level. Or should I say, “came along”, since he’s been dead for at least four centuries now. Check out this excerpt from The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow:

The earliest champion of language purism was a poet whose work very few francophones actually read: Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628). While there are many cases of literary geniuses whose writing shaped entire cultures – Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, to name a few – there are very few instances of a single person influencing the way an entire people think about their language the way Malherbe did.

…

Although he became the official poet of King Henry IV in 1605, at age fifty, and retained that status under Louis XIII, it was Malherbe’s literary criticism, not his poetry, that gained him repute among his contemporaries and turned him into the French language’s first real guru. In his criticism Malherbe preached the values of clarity, precision and rigour. He argued that good writing had to be stripped of ornamentation, repetition, archaisms, regionalisms and hyperbole. Malherbe rejected the idea of synonyms; in his view each word should have a definition, and a definition should apply to only one word.

…

Malherbe was quite possibly the biggest and most brazen language snob the world has ever seen. Biographers describe him as a fretful fault-finder who spent his life attacking, both verbally and in writing, every mistake – or what he regarded as mistakes – he could find and anyone who made one. He wanted to banish the word vent (wind) because it was a synonym for fart, and pouls (pulse) because it sounded like pou (louse). He feared no one, and even reproached King Henri’s son, the future Louis XIII, for signing his name as “Loys” rather than “Louys”, an inconsistency that many courtiers would not have dared point out had they noticed it. … Malherbe once refused to be treated by a certain Doctor Guebeneau because “his name sounded like a dog’s name”. On his deathbed he was still correcting the language of the woman  who was looking after him.

The emphasis is mine. I mean, this guy was correcting the language of the woman who was nursing him on his deathbed. Case closed.

Before anyone points out, I should state that I know that he wasn’t a “grammar” nazi, since he was more of an orthographic authoritarian, a morpheme Machiavelli, a lexeme licensee, a phoneme preservationist. The term “grammar nazi” is used as a catch-all for all the above, a fact that will no doubt infuriate those who truly are grammar nazis.

This makes me think there’s a bug in Thunar’s time-remaining code.

Only 292 billion years left to delete this file? No hay problema!

There are certain times of the year when it would be more opportune to be “afflicted” by the most common type of colour-blindness.

As promised, the next in the series, albeit a little delayed.