What on Earth??

[Dan Goncharoff]

No soap, radio.
DanG



On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: What on Earth??
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>

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