"Everything takes longer than it takes"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Ah! Aha! Quite. Jolly good, what?

  JL

"James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "James A. Landau"
Subject: Re: "Everything takes longer than it takes"
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Laurence Horn quoted Bertrand Russell:

"I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first
seeing it, remarked, "I thought your yacht was larger than it is";
and the owner replied, "No, my yacht is not larger than it is."

--Russell (1905), "On Descriptions"

The guest is being perfectly reasonable. He is saying, but not at such great length, "Before I saw your yacht, I had *thought* its size to be greater than the actual size, which I am now observing, of your yacht."

The yacht-owner, obviously a paranoid Anglo-Saxon who sees Irish bulls under every bed, then misinterpreted the guest's word as an "apparently logical but actually illogical statement".

- James A. Landau

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Would the list prefer that I insert a gratuitous
half-assed political statement here?
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