Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 17:49:21 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan Hubbard), bright@wintelcom.net (Alfred Perlstein), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fortune candidate from #FreeBSD on EFNet Message-ID: <200011081749.KAA20426@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001108183028.F65938@lpt.ens.fr> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Nov 08, 2000 06:30:28 PM
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> You may be right -- I know I mentally completed the phrase when > reading it, though I'm only familiar with it through Bertie Wooster. > But it seems to me that even the incompletely understood joke > "God works in mysterious ways, but FreeBSD has man pages" > (or whatever the exact words were) is funny. People may not > know the quotation in the first half, but it's pretty obvious that > it's a quotation, and the sentence makes sense by itself > even without the "wonders to perform" part. Maybe. The original quotation had two seperate sentences, without a conjoining "but" or "and". I guess this could have been implied in the mind of the reader by their otherwise being totally unrelated to one another's topic. I could probably also argue that you picked "but" because you completed the phrase mentally. I still think that including the remainder of the sentence makes for a more universally comprehensible joke. I keep thinking of the joke being translated into another language, without the cultural baggage needed for completion of the sentence, and wonder how well that baggage would be implied. Of course, computer programmers as a class tend, more than other professions, to have English literacy, and have a (some would say perverse) tendency toward puns and other word and language games, which closely correlate to their skills as programmers. I've often wondered if this would still be true, if many of the first computer scientists and computer language designers didn't have a background in cognitive psychology; maybe it's just built into the software legacy these people left us, and isn't really a skill that would be required to tell computer equipment how to solve problems. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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