Geoff enscribed thusly:
> This may seem hideously inane, but i havent been able to find any
> reference on the web for this. I'd assume that its a control character
> that backspaces in (emacs? vim?). The thing i dont get is the humour. I
> remember something in my redhat 5.2 manual along the lines of
> "xscreensave gives you hours of enjoyment^h^h^h^h monitor saving" with a
> footnote saying its a joke, not a typo.
It goes like this...
The backspace character is a Cntrl-H (08). A "control character"
is often displayed as a caret (^) for the "control" and then the character
that would be hit to generate the character. Thus a backspace is indicated
by a ^h or ^H.
When someone want to make a joke as if they started to say
one thing, then backspaced over it, then type "the clean version", they
can use this. They put the "funny comment", then a series of ^H's as
if they were backspaces (which they aren't because they really typed
<caret> <H>) and then typed out "the correction".
It's a form of written "soto voice".
In your example above, the clean statement is "hours of monitor
saving" while the soto-voice smart remark is "hours of enjoyment"
(presumably watching pipes build themselves).
> The thing is, how is this funny? Anyone?
It's not the ^H per se. It's the "thinking one thing and saying
saying something else" that's the joke.
Does that help?
> thanks,
> geoff
Mike
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