tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 08 04:30:30 2000
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Re: some puns...
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: some puns...
- Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 07:30:17 -0500 (EST)
> > Carleton Copeland wrote:
> > > BTW, if you ever tire of the hunt, compare your catch with an old master
> > > list of jeux de mots at
> > > </tlhIngan-Hol/1997/Feb97/0136.html>. There are whole
> > > classes of these--like "reversies"--of which I was ignorant.
Mike Crane wrote:
> I tried looking at these puns but I can't find the page. Is
> this the right address?
I had explained this in my response to Carleton. I'll provide
the English of what I was trying to say:
qen jIjatlh:
> *URL-vam vISuchlaHbe'law', *website choHlu'bejmo'. HIDjolev vIlo'
> 'ej February 1997 jabbI'ID tlhegh vIlaD.
"I apparently cannot visit this URL, since the website is undergoing
(or underwent) renovation. I used the menu to read the February
1997 thread."
To find the message, try this:
/tlhIngan-Hol/1997/February/
Presumably, judging by the message number (assuming they didn't
change under the website re-organization), this is the message
referred to above:
/tlhIngan-Hol/1997/February/msg00136.html
[Yup - I just received Carleton's mail and it's the same one.]
Be careful though, many of the "puns" are really speculative.
(Well, so was my <quS> from "cushion"... for all I know MO has a
favourite chair named "Koosh".)
[For example, giving the above message a quick read... I always
thought <nol> came from "grassy knoll", which is what I
associate with funerals. Apparently someone else has a different
derivation for it, so likely both of us are just reading our
own expectations back into the word.]
jatlh qa'ral:
>(Your pun on {lav} is quite beyond me.)
I doubt MO was thinking this, but when I saw <lav> "shrub" I thought
"lavatory". I know the word means different things depending on which
dialect of English (as does restroom, powder room, washroom, etc.), but
the meaning that I am familiar with means a room with, ahem, toilet
facilities. Now imagine a warrior going off to battle and he really,
ahem, needs to pee. He sees a shrub and thinks "lav"atory...
Like I said, it's probably more the workings of my own demented mind
than of MO's. He might have actually been thinking "lav"ender, a kind
of plant. Or it's not a pun and he just made it up because it sounded
good. (Considering that some of the Klingon sounds could represent
any number of English letters {e.g. tlh = z, kl}, and the fact that
Klingon words are mostly monosyllabic, some of them will sound like
they are puns unintentionally, to people who think hard enough.)
--
De'vID
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