What on Earth??

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Oct 17 19:14:24 UTC 2011


On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Reminds me of those old papers by Georgia Green and/or Jerry Morgan that begin with a sentence that sounds like word salad out of context

That reminds me of something that I heard recited by white
barracksmates when I was at the Army Language School, back in '60. It
went something like;

Q. "Why a duck?'
A. "Because the moon."

There was a string of such nonsensical question/answer pairs. IIRC,
this - or something like it - was said to have originated with
Groucho.

A quick check with W:pedia shows this to be fact. So, perhaps,
everybody but me is more than familiar with this bit. As was the case
with a Cosby Show spinoff, "it's a different world."

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list