Robby Findler wrote: >On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Vincent St-Amour <[email protected]> >wrote: >> How about "Ceci n'est pas une string."? That's closer to correct >> grammar, and the joke is still easy to understand. > >Would the Académie française approve of this joke?
My guess would be that, yes, probably they would approve of it, considering the facts that: a) French people use the English word "string" fairly frequently (though the meaning of that word in French is slightly different from the usual English meaning; do a search on http://www.google.fr/imghp?hl=fr if you really want to know) b) the Academie is essentially an old gentlemen's club, who are probably not above enjoying a slightly risque polylingual joke (one now-deceased academicien, Jean Dutourd, was after all well known for singing ribald songs on national radio). (alas, "string" in French is actually a masculine noun, while in Mr. St-Amour's sentence above "une string" implies that "string" is a feminine noun, but we'll just invoke poetic license) Unfortunately the latest version of the Academie's dictionary currently only covers the letters from "a" to "p" so we'll have to wait a little bit more to know whether they actually approve of the word "string" or not (they started working on that latest version of the dictionary in 1986, so don't hold your breath...) Philippe _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
