I found this joke on a humorous book on the use of punctuation. The book's name is, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. This is a great book on the proper use of different punctuation, peppered with some witty and funny stories. Anyway, the joke reads like this,
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.
Do you know any other joke to share about the use of punctuation?
or... the punctuated version:
A woman. Without her, man is nothing.Another one where puncutation saves lives:
Some people enjoy cooking, their families, and their dogs.
Some people enjoy cooking their families and their dogs.
There is a riddle in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the companions are puzzled by the inscription over a locked pair of massive stone doors they need to enter. There is an inscription on it in Elvish which Gandalf translates as:
The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter.
Gimli guesses that the inscription means "If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open..." Gandalf notes that in the days of Durin, the gates were usually open, and when they were closed the password was not a secret. Unfortunately Gandalf does not know the word, and spends hours trying dozens of spells to reveal the word.
Finally, he suddenly realizes the answer:
"The translation should have been Say 'Friend' and enter."
It's a punctuation problem. The password is the word friend.
Let's eat grandma!
Whaaaat?!
Let's eat, grandma!
(punctuation saves lives)
"Dan, if it's not top secret, how does one type something that will 'magically' appear upon dragging one's mouse?"
You go to the "more color" button, which is just to the right of the "A" ("recent color") button, and you set the foreground color to white--that's the swatch at the right end of the top row of color.
If you set the color to green, it's still visible.
If you set the color to this shade of gray, it's hard to see.
vvvvvvvvv
If you set it to white, it's invisible. When you drag your mouse across it, the reverse-color highlighting makes it visible.
^^^^^^^^^^
