From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Apr 10 2:11:52 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B78D437B613 for ; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 02:11:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from des@flood.ping.uio.no) Received: (from des@localhost) by flood.ping.uio.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) id LAA87551; Mon, 10 Apr 2000 11:10:56 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from des@flood.ping.uio.no) To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: Brett Taylor , Christian Weisgerber , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Spellings [was Re: BSDCon East] References: <20000410101700.B317@theory8.physics.iisc.ernet.in> From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: 10 Apr 2000 11:10:55 +0200 In-Reply-To: Rahul Siddharthan's message of "Mon, 10 Apr 2000 10:17:01 +0530" Message-ID: Lines: 20 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) Emacs/20.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Rahul Siddharthan writes: > > > > apparently French physicists were annoyed when John Wheeler coined > > > > the word "black hole" because it translated to anus. > > > Bollocks. To me, it sounds like just another one of those the-french- > > > are-so-weird stories the anglosaxon are so fond of telling. > > Believe it or not as you will - since I've heard the story directly from > > Wheeler, Thorne and my thesis advisor (who did his PhD w/ Wheeler and > > studied under Thorne at CalTech) I'll take their word for it. > I just asked a French teacher of my acquaintance. She said it's true, > it can be interpreted in that way. No more than the english term "black hole" can be interpreted as meaning "anus". The usual vulgar term for "asshole" in French is "trou de balle" ("bullet hole"). DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message