Beyond Repair

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Langwidge...

Ah… the wonders of knowing a language and some of its oddities. I just returned from a 3 day trip to Kerala, a state in India, and all the way through got whacked about my inability to understand Tamil, my (supposedly) mother tongue. While in a bookshop there I saw a book on punctuation whose title I particularly love.

It is the brilliantly titled “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” with a panda on the front cover holding a smoking gun ^_^ For some reason I find this hysterically funny. Then a joke I’d read a few years back came to mind.

“A farmer went to market to buy a bull, and ended up buying one that cost considerably more than he expected. He needed to telegraph his wife to tell her to come and pick him up in their truck, but he had only enough money for one word. He thought long and hard, and finally wrote down the word of his choice. “You picked ‘Comfortable’??” exclaimed the telegraph man. “What is that supposed to mean??!!” “Don’t you worry about that.”, said the farmer. “Susie ain’t the best reader in the world. She’ll say the word real slow.”

Eeee…warm, fuzzy feelings.

~I don’t understand a word you’re saying half the time. The other half I know you’re wrong.~