What on Earth??

[paul johnson]

paul johnson

You wanna buy a duck?  Joe Penner

On 10/17/2011 9:02 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> --What's the difference between a duck?
> --The higher the fewer.
>
> Mad Magazine, maybe?
>
> As I recall, the Groucho "Why a duck?" was somehow connected with "viaduct".  But I'm not sure about the provenance of the above riddle, or the classic "No soap, radio" Dan mentions, which I seem to recall somehow involved two penguins in the bathtub and may have constituted a response to "Please pass the soap."
>
> LH
>
> On Oct 17, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
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>>>
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--
What grit stone do you use to dull  Occam's razor.

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