Four Funny Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. If you're new to Louisiana, do try the boiled crawfish, but know (Item 7) that it's a faux pas to eat them at your desk at work:

Now, crawfish are delicious but they are both 1) fragrant and 2) messy. I love a good weekend crawfish boil where you're eating outside with family and friends and wearing old clothes.

You could smell the crawfish as soon as you got off the elevator. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and wore several napkins as bibs to keep from getting anything on his shirt.

Finished and did the surgeon just-scrubbed-in walk to the bathroom so he could wash his messy, messy hands. We had to call maintenance to come empty the garbage cans because the smell permeated the office and we couldn't work that way that afternoon.

The above comes from a collection of other similarly amusing first impressions by new coworkers at Ask a Manager.

2. At The Speculative Grammarian one R.S. Sriyatha expounds on ancient Greek verbal fillers:

The perspicacious reader will have already figured out where this paper is headed (aside from oblivion). It is obvious, when we consider that Xenophon did not write down his work himself, but rather dictated it, that it is the student rather than the instructor who has translated the text most faithfully. No one, in speech, says things like, "Thereupon, accordingly, indeed, on the one hand, they pitched camp; and then on the next day also likewise they arose indeed and accordingly marched ten stades." But everyone says things like, "So, um, ah, un...they pitched camp; and, well, the next day...ah, you know, they got up, um, and, ah, marched ten stades."

What more need I say here? It is obvious that for hundreds of years classicists have misinterpreted the meaning of Greek particles. Most, if not all of them, have no meaning whatsoever...

The piece, which popped up at Hacker News recently, is from the 1990 issue of that satirical journal, for which a friend from my Rice days sometimes contributed. I didn't know it has been around that long, and I'm glad to see it's still there.

3. A recently-retired Ford executive has made the Wall Street Journal for maintaining an extensive record of his coworkers' verbal flubs:

The risk of getting flagged added to the pressure of presenting at meetings, Murphy said. "All the sudden you'll hear a pen click, and you're thinking, 'What did I say that wasn't right?'" Often, a Board Word would help defuse an intense meeting, he said.

Murphy appreciates O'Brien's grievance process, where he allows the person to argue their case before the entry is made. Murphy rarely wins the appeal, though, like the time he blurted out: "He's going to be so happy he'll be like a canary in a coal mine!"

O'Brien explained that the canary in that particular idiom ends up dead. Murphy, laughing, explained that the canary was probably happy when it first got down there.

There are several pictures of his records, which he kept on whiteboards in his office.

4. I'll end with a visual: Yes, This Photo From Everest Is Real.

-- CAV