[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

...and the word "pone," for that, just doesn't exist. But one day, it might.

It does exist, although not in the context we are discussing. Pone (noun not a verb) actually means:

Unleavened maize bread in the form of flat oval cakes or loaves, originally as prepared with water by North American Indians and cooked in hot ashes.

Source

Some pone for thought, perhaps.

[Mu009]

Originally Posted by binand

Reminded me of this article that I simply had to dig out of my old (Lynx/Mosaic days) bookmarks.html:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/...t-my-wife.html

Thanks for sharing!

MODS: I wish these threads also had a thanks button, where it wouldn't go towards the count, just as it's with posts.

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by binand

Reminded me of this article.

Thanks for the link. That was im-pressive!

Fond as I am of my mother tongue, it is the zillion possibilities of English language that makes it a medium closer to my heart. While all regional languages are confined by the limits of geography and hence can only boast of a limited user base, English - with its global audience and local necessities, has managed to acquire a shape and size that is beyond the grasp of a normal mortal.

There is perhaps no living language as lively and recipient of change as English. While the wry humour and stiff upper lippish usage of the British have given way to a more expressive, descriptive and innovative style, the impatience and instinctiveness of the millennials have also given rise to a language that would make the lords of English literature turn twice around in their graves.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Actually, it is the shape and size of the contributors to English, rather than its current audience (although the process continues) that formed it, and made it so complex.

Sadly, the millenials (and even their parents) were never taught the complexity aspect.

[AltoLXI]

Poor helmet kills 19-yr-old near Lalbagh.

Ambiguous and wrong choice of words !!! Poor helmet

Link

[binand]

Originally Posted by binand

Shashi Tharoor is probably tooting his own horn.

Shashi Tharoor himself acknowledges this now:

https://www.theweek.in/columns/shash...e-needful.html

Two columns ago, I rashly ventured the immodest thought that I had considered myself the inventor of the term ‘prepone’, which I had come up with at St Stephen’s in 1972. Boy, was I wrong. In keeping with the long-standing wisdom that there is nothing new under the sun, I am told by Catherine Henstridge of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), no less, that they have an example of the use of the word “prepone” from 1913, and it is not, alas, Indian.

[samaspire]

(Another good one from WhatsApp)

Puns upon a time

1. The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

17. A backward poet writes inverse.

18. In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.

19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you'd be in Seine.

21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'

22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says 'Dam!'

23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.'

25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

26. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Some of those jokes were old when I was young, over half a century ago!

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Some of those jokes were old when I was young, over half a century ago!

But then, you were in England. And perhaps the world at large still caught cold if Britain sneezed .

We (the commoners not intellectuals) were probably at least a decade or two away from grasping what these punches actually meant. Even now, the school taught textual - grammatical English isn't potent enough to enable a newbie to enjoy the nuances of the language.

Besides, most puns are contextual and hence need some mental acrobatics for them to make sense. For instance, YNK, a renowned Kannada journalist is said to have commented once:
ಸುಮ್ನೆ ಇರಾನಂದ್ರೆ ಇರಾಕ್ ಬಿಡೋದಿಲ್ಲ (Sumne Iranandre Irak bidodilla)

Read without context, it simply means "One can't live in peace these days".

Contextually, it means that "Even if Iran wants to keep quiet, Iraq won't let it", the inherent reference being to the Gulf crisis.

Another of his tongue in cheek one liners is recalled by TJS George in his book Askew: A short biography of Bangalore. An excerpt of the same is available at scroll.in.

Kuvempu did not name his sons but sentenced them.

Only those who knew that Kuvempu's sons were named Poornachandra Tejaswi and Kukilodaya Chaitra would understand the humour of this ingenious sentence!

Originally Posted by samaspire

Puns upon a time

So, while samaspire's post takes you back to your childhood, it might as well dispatch others on a word - meaning - context hunt. Hence, what appears mundane for native users of the Queen's language, is indeed a novelty for us .

[Thad E Ginathom]

Context is all.

And location can count too. I'm now going back to London from the North of England where the sense of humour is strange. In a wonderful story of way!

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Context is all

And this context is the exact thing you deny us by often not quoting the relevant posts/lines. Please do.

In a wonderful story of way!

Have heard of the north-south divide, but that's about it. Although I vaguely remember a Professor citing the example of It's Grim Up North to suggest a parallel divide in the state of Karnataka too. Kindly throw some more light on this.

[_nitink_]

Since the past few years, I have been observing a very common language mistake which almost every second person in the forum makes.
For example, "My father and myself", "Arvind, Abhishek and myself Nitin", etc. These statements are wrong. The correct statement will be "My father and I", "Arvind, Abhishek and I, Nitin".
My English teacher during a presentation told us about this. She used to very furious if we made this mistake again.

[swissknife]

Originally Posted by _nitink_

Since the past few years, I have been observing a very common language mistake which almost every second person in the forum makes.

For the last several years I have seen people using "since and for" interchangeably.

[binand]

Originally Posted by _nitink_

Since the past few years, I have been observing a very common language mistake which almost every second person in the forum makes.
For example, "My father and myself", "Arvind, Abhishek and myself Nitin", etc. These statements are wrong. The correct statement will be "My father and I", "Arvind, Abhishek and I, Nitin".

Merriam Webster says that it is OK to use "myself" instead of "I" or "me", in certain contexts.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myself

Such uses almost always occur when the speaker or writer is referring to himself or herself as an object of discourse rather than as a participant in discourse.

On the other hand, I think this excerpt has a problem in its tenses:

Originally Posted by _nitink_

My English teacher during a presentation told us about this. She used to very furious if we made this mistake again.

(There is a clause ordering error too, which suggests that the English teacher was yours only during the presentation; I presume that wasn't the case).

[samaspire]

My English teacher, during a presentation, told us about this.

Just a couple of missing commas in the first sentence.