On Sun, Mar 09, 2003 at 12:41:57PM +0100, Steffen Mueller wrote: > Nicholas Clark wrote: > >In the gents toilets at K�ln/Bonn airport I found a vending machine selling > >perl condoms. So I bought a box: > > > >http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/P/Condom.jpeg > > That's pretty funny, but maybe more so to people from outside Germany as > "Perle" means "pearl". I suppose I needn't explain what that's to say in > the context.
That's roughly what I guessed, but why does the e get dropped for Perlnoppen? Standard practice? > >I wonder if the manufacturers (Ritex Gummiwarenfabrik GmbH - www.ritex.de) > >could be convinced to donate packets for publicity (say) to say Perl > >conferences. > > If they ever heard of the programming language... I'll surely watch > those condom machines closer from now on. It strikes me as something that thinkgeek (or similar) might be able to sell. I couldn't figure out whether anyone was actually selling them online. I can't see why they'd object to developing a market selling to perl programmers, assuming that perl programmers want to spend money. (and don't try to pay with rubber cheques) > >PS Offhand I translate "Gummiwarenfabrik" as rubber-ware factory, but I may > > have that wrong. > > That's pretty good. Well, perhaps not quite - Waren translate to goods. Aha - amazingly for me, I didn't make a typo. My dictionary doesn't define wares as a synonym for goods, but it felt close enough, hence my sort-of pun on wear. My dictionary gives: ware (now usually plural): articles of merchandise collectively : an article of merchandise ... and many more I didn't know - ware is Scottish dialect for both springtime and seaweed, a Scottish word for spend, an archaic word for aware, and an obsolete past participle of wear. (ie an old spelling of "wore") Nicholas Clark
