MSGID: 1:153/716.0 02ca0700
REPLY: 2:221/6.0 601ed9ac
CHRS: IBMPC 2
Hi, Anton!  Recently you wrote in a message to All:

AS>  Can you please review my translation into English
AS>  of the following little joke:


           With pleasure.  I enjoyed this joke because I'm interested in how
people think & while I'm not a techie some of my favourite people are.  :-))



AS>  A programmer's mother asks her son: "Will you please
AS>  go to the drugstore and buy us some buns?


           The larger drugstores around here do offer a limited selection of
groceries, but in most cases it does not include perishables.  YMMV....  :-)



AS>  And if they happen to have eggs, then take ten."  The
AS>  programmer enters the drugstore and says to the clerk:

AS>   -- Have you eggs?
AS>   -- We sure do, sir.
AS>   -- Ten buns, please.


           Uh-huh.  Mom speaks English the way she learned it... and doesn't
know how to use techie jargon such as "if exist goto", which would have made
more sense to her son.  I'm reminded of how my mother politely enquired each
year whether I had "a very large class".  I couldn't get it through her head
that as a schoolteacher I had eight or more classes of various sizes.

           I am also reminded of a joke in which a woman gives her husband a
shopping list with items numbered like this:

                    1.  lettuce
                    2.  carrots

                         [...]

                    14.  milk

He returns with one head of lettuce, two carrots... plus fourteen gallons of
milk.  In US measurements, this would be approximately sixty litres....  :-Q




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