The other night, Ruth and I were talking about collective nouns (y’know, like a herd of cows or a flock of sheep) and came
up with the somewhat batty idea of solitary nouns. Like collective nouns, but for a singular subject (one cow, sheep, or whatever).
Then, we tried to derive what the words could be. Some of the results write themselves.1
Mooving right on…
I’d be lion if I said I wasn’t proud of this one.
I’m pollen out all the collective nouns now!
Some of them involve removing one or more letters from the collective noun to invent a shorter word to be the solitary noun.
They stay healthy by working out and getting vaccinated, both of which give them tough anty bodies.
The sound of an oven is a cackling: “When shall I one meet again?”
Eventually it grows up into a star, which are a lot louder.2For others, we really had to stretch the concept by mutating words in ways that “felt right”, using phoenetic spellings, or even inventing collective nouns so that we
could singularise them:
For more goose-related wordplay, take a gander at this blog post from a few years back.
Getting smashed doesn’t have to end with bumps and boozers.3
Blast but not least.
Did I miss any obvious ones?
Footnotes
1 Also consider “parliament of owls” ➔ “politician of owl”, “troop of monkeys” ➔ “soldier
of monkey”, “band of gorillas” ➔ “musician of gorilla”. Hey… is that where that band‘s name come from?
2 Is “cluster of stars” ➔ “luster of star” anything?
3 Ruth enjoyed the singularised “a low of old bollock”, too.
103: Early Hints (“I’m not sure this can last forever.”)
300: Multiple Choices (“There are so many ways I can do better than you.”)
303: See Other (“You should date other people.”)
304: Not Modified (“With you, I feel like I’m stagnating.”)
402: Payment Required (“I am a prostitute.”)
403: Forbidden (“You don’t get this any more.”)
406: Not Acceptable (“I could never introduce you to my parents.”)
408: Request Timeout (“You keep saying you’ll propose but you never do.”)
409: Conflict (“We hate each other.”)
410: Gone (ghosted)
411: Length Required (“Your penis is too small.”)
413: Payload Too Large (“Your penis is too big.”)
416: Range Not Satisfied (“Our sex life is boring and repretitive.”)
425: Too Early (“Your premature ejaculation is a problem.”)
428: Precondition Failed (“You’re still sleeping with your ex-!?”)
429: Too Many Requests (“You’re so demanding!”)
451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons (“I’m married to somebody else.”)
502: Bad Gateway (“Your pussy is awful.”)
508: Loop Detected (“We just keep fighting.”)
With thanks to Ruth for the conversation that inspired these pictures, and apologies to the rest of the Internet for creating them.
Of course, you don’t strictly need a digital wallet to use EGX. But as we’re in a culture where people invariably ask “is
there an app for it?”, I thought I’d make one.
You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet
connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?
Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:
Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features
unique to Emma Goldcoin include:
Using it doesn’t massively contribute to energy wastage and environmental damage.
It doesn’t increase the digital divide by helping early adopters at the expense of late adopters.
It’s entirely secure: it’s mathematically impossible to “steal”EGX.
Emma Goldcoin is so simple that you don’t even need a computer to use it: it “just works”.
Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what
those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!
A guy walks into a bar. It’s a low one, so he gets a raise within his first six months on the job.
Did you hear the one about the woman who reported sexual harassment? Of course you didn’t; she was forced to sign an NDA.
…
Louise Bernikow once wrote: Humour tells you where the trouble is.
It’s okay to laugh at these jokes. But only so long as you do so with an awareness that their comedy comes from the nuggets of truth within each and every one of them. Our society’s
come a long way this last century, but we’ve still got a long way to go.
I’ve lately taken an interest in collecting jokes that haven’t aged well. By which I mean: jokes that no longer work, or require explanation, because they’re conceptually ‘dated’.
Typically, these jokes aren’t funny any more, or are only funny to people who were around at the time that they were first conceived, and I imagine that we, as a civilisation, are
necessarily relegating more and more jokes into this particular category as time goes on.
I don’t mean outdated like this joke, published in 1803, but ones that require explanation because a listener is no longer likely to recognise the concepts or people referenced. For
example, if it were the case that warming pans were now such an alien concept that nobody knew what they were any more, then the above would certainly qualify (that’s not true yet…
right?).
My favourite joke of this category is the following classic student joke, which was relevant when I first heard it in the 1990s:
What’s pink and takes an hour to drink?
Grant cheque
By way of explanation: the grant cheque was how British students used to receive their government aid to support them during their studies. It had become gradually smaller (relative to
the value of the pound) over time by failing to rise in value in line with inflation, and was printed on pink paper, hence the joke. There was an effort to revive it in the late
1990s/early 2000s as follows:
What’s green and takes an hour to drink?
Loan cheque
By this point, the grant had been replaced by the student loan, whose payments came printed on green paper instead. This is, of course, simply an example of adapting an old joke for a
new audience, as we’ve all seen time and again with the inevitable string of recycled gags that get rolled-out every time a celebrity is accused of a sex crime. Incidentally, the
revised form of the grant cheque/loan cheque joke has itself become dated as students now typically receive all of their loan payments directly to their bank accounts for convenient
immediate spending rather than what my generation had to do which was to make the beans-and-rice stretch another few days until the cheque cleared.
This 4th/5th century joke (presented with a contemporary translation) doesn’t count, because it’s still flipping hilarious.
Here’s another example:
Bill and Ben the flower pot men are in the garden.
“Flobalobalobalob,” says Bill
Ben replies: “You’re drunk, Bill.”
Now those of you who are about my age, or older, are unlikely to see why this joke has dated badly. But it is dated, because the 2001 reboot of The Flower Pot Men (now
called simply Bill and Ben) features the titular characters speaking in reasonably-normal English! The idea that they were only speaking Oddle Poddle because they were too
pissed to speak English is no longer a point of humour, and increasingly the population won’t remember the original stilted dialect of the flower pot men. If we assume that anybody
under the age of 24 is more-likely to have come across the newer incarnation then that’s a third of the population!
Let’s try another, which became dated at about the same time:
Why are hurricanes names after women?
Because when they come they’re wet and wild and when they go they take your house and your car.
The history of how we’ve named hurricanes over the centuries is really quite interesting, and its
certainly true that for the majority of the period during which both meteorologists and the general public have shared the same names for tropical storms they’ve been named after women.
Depending on where you are in the world, though, it’s not been true for some time: Australia began using a mixture of masculine and feminine names during the 1970s, but other regions
took until the millennium before they followed suit. However, the point still remains that this joke has been dated for a long while.
Why is a topical joke like a hurricane? When it comes, you’ve never seen anything like it. By the time it goes, you’re sick of it.
Here’s a very highly-charged joke from the 1960s which I think we can all be glad doesn’t make much sense any more:
What’s all black and comes in an all white box?
Sammy Davis Jr.
For those needing the context: Sammy Davis Jr. was a black American singer, comedian, and variety show host who triggered significant controversy when he married white Swedish actress
May Britt. Interracial marriage was at the time still illegal across much of the United States (such prohibition wouldn’t be ruled unconstitutional until the amazingly-named “Loving Day” in 1967) and relationships between whites and “coloureds” were highly taboo even where they weren’t forbidden by law.
Topical jokes like that are often too easy, like this one – even shorter-lived – from the summer of 1995, presented here with no further interpretation:
Q: What’s the difference between O. J. Simpson and Christopher Reeve?
A: O. J.’s gonna walk!
Perhaps my favourite strictly-topical joke of this variety, though, comes from 1989:
Q: Why is Margaret Thatcher like a pound coin?
A: She’s thick, brassy, and she thinks she’s a sovereign.
It’s at least two-thirds funny even if you don’t have the full context, and that’s what’s most-interesting about it: it’ll take until the new £1 becomes ubiquitous and the old one
mostly-forgotten before it will lose all of its meaning. But as you’ve probably forgotten why the third part of the punchline – “…and she thinks she’s a sovereign” – comes
from, I’ll illuminate you. The joke is wordplay: there are two meanings to “sovereign” in this sentence. The first, of course, is that a sovereign is the bullion coin representing the same value as a conventional pound coin.
To understand the second, we must first remind ourselves of the majestic plural, better known as the “royal ‘we'”. In 1989,
following the birth of her grandson Michael, Thatcher made a statement saying “we have become a grandmother”, resulting in much
disdain and mockery by the press at the time. The Prime Minister’s relationship with the Queen had always been a frosty one, and Thatcher’s (mis)use of a manner of speech that was
typically reserved for the use of royalty did nothing to make her look any more-respectful of the monarch.
And you thought it was just something to put in your penis. Turns out it’s something to put in your lungs, too.
The final example I’ve got died out as a joke as a result of changing brand identities, more cost-effective packaging materials, and the gradual decline of tobacco smoking. But for a
long while, while Prince Albert Pipe Tobacco was still sold in larger quantities as it always had been, in a can, a popular prank perpetrated by radio stations that went in for such
things was to call a tobacconist and ask, “Have you got Prince Albert in a can?”. The tobacconist would invariably answer in the affirmative, at which point the prankster would response
“Well let him out then!” This joke may well predate the “Is your refrigerator running?” prank call that might be more-familiar to today’s audiences.
If you’ve got any jokes that have aged badly, I’d love to hear them. And then, I suppose, have them explained to me.
I’d like to share with you the worst joke that I ever heard. Those of you who’ve heard me tell jokes before might think that you’ve already suffered through the worst joke
I ever heard, but you honestly haven’t. The worst joke I ever heard was simply too awful to share. But maybe now is the time.
The playground of Holme Slack Primary School, and the very wall that I was probably sitting on when I first heard this “joke”.
To understand the joke, though, you must first understand where I grew up. For most of my school years, I lived in Preston, in the North-West of England. After first starting school in
Scotland, and having been brought up by parents who’d grown up in the North-East, I quickly found that there were a plethora of local dialect differences and regional slang terms that I
needed to get to grips with in order to fit into my new environment. Pants, pumps, toffee, and bap, among others, had a different meaning here, along with entirely new words like belm
(an insult), gizzit (a contraction of “give it [to me]”), pegging it (running away, perhaps related to “legging it”?), and kegs (trousers). The playground game of “tag” was called
“tig”. “Nosh” switched from being a noun to a verb. And when you wanted somebody to stop doing something, you’d invariably use the imperative “pack it in!”
And it’s that last one that spawned the worst joke I ever heard. Try, if you can, to imagine the words “pack it in”, spoken quickly, in a broad Lancashire accent, by a young child. And
then appreciate this exchange, which was disturbingly common in my primary school:
Child 1: Pack it in!
Child 2: Pakis don’t come in tins. They come from India.
In case it’s too subtle for you, the “joke” stems from the phonetic similarity, especially in the dialect in question, between the phrase “pack it in” and the phrase “paki tin”.
Unless the recent horsemeat scandal investigation takes a dramatic and unexpected twist, we can be pretty sure that this item contains no people from Pakistan.
In case you need to ask why this is the worst joke I ever heard, allow me to explain in detail everything that’s wrong with it.
It’s needlessly racist
Now I don’t believe that race is necessarily above humour – and the same goes for gender, sexuality, religion, politics, etc. But there’s difference between using a racial slur to
no benefit (think: any joke containing the word “nigger” or “polak”), and jokes which make use of race. Here’s one of my favourite jokes involving race:
The Pope goes on a tour of South Africa, and he’s travelling in his Popemobile alongside a large river when he catches sight of a black man in the river. The man is struggling
and screaming as he tries in vain to fight off a huge crocodile. Suddenly, the Pope sees two white men leap into the water, drag the man and the crocodile to land, and beat
the crocodile to death with sticks, saving the black man’s life.
The Pope, impressed, goes over to where the two men are standing. “That was the most wonderful thing to do,” his holiness says. “You put yourselves at risk to kill the crocodile and
save the life of your fellow man. I can see that it is men like you who will rebuild this country as an example to the world of true racial harmony.”
The Pope goes on his way. “Who was that?” asks one of the white men.
The other replies: “That was the Pope. He is in direct communication with God. He knows everything.”
“Maybe,” says the first, “But he knows fuck all about crocodile fishing!”
The butt of this joke is not race, but racists. In this example, the joke does not condone the actions of the ‘crocodile fishers’: in fact, it contrasts them (through the Pope’s mistake
in understanding) to the opposite state of racial harmony. It does not work to reinforce stereotypes. Oh, and it’s funny: that’s always a benefit in a joke. Contrast to jokes about
negative racial sterotypes or using offensive terms for no value other than for the words themselves: these types of jokes can serve to reinforce the position of actual
racists who see their use (and acceptance) as reinforcement for their position, and – if you enjoy them – it’s worth asking yourself what that says about you, or might be seen to say
about you.
Among its other faults, the worst joke I ever heard relies upon an incredibly weak pun. It even makes this comic, by Completely Serious Comics, look good. [click for full comic]
It’s an incredibly weak pun
What would “paki tin” even mean, if that were what the first child had meant? It’s not as if we say “beans tin” or “soup tin” or “peas tin”. Surely, if this piece of
wordplay were to make any sense whatsoever, it would have to be based on the phrase “tin of pakis”, which I’m pretty sure nobody has ever said before, ever.
To illustrate, let me have a go at making a pun-based joke without the requirement that the pun actually make sense:
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Yoodough.
Yoodough who?
Youdough not understand how jokes are supposed to work, do you?
You see? Not funny (except perhaps in the most dadaist of humour circles). It’s not funny because Yoodough isn’t actually a name. The format of the joke is ruined by balancing
a pun against a phrase that just doesn’t exist. Let’s try again, but this time actually make the pun make sense (note that it’s still a knock knock joke, and therefore it probably still
isn’t funny, except in an academic way):
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Yuri.
Yuri who?
Yuri-ly expect me to laugh at this, do you?
It’s stupidly inaccurate
Let’s just stop and take a look at that punchline again, shall we: “Pakis… come from India.” Even ignoring everything else that’s wrong with this joke, this is simply… wrong! Now that’s
not to say that jokes always have to reflect reality. Here’s a classic joke that doesn’t:
Lion woke up one morning with an overbearing desire to remind his fellow creatures that he was king of the jungle. So he marched over to a monkey and roared: “Who is the mightiest
animal in the jungle?”
“You are, Master,” said the monkey, quivering.
Then the lion came across a wildebeest.
“Who is the mightiest animal in the jungle?” roared the lion.
“You are, Master,” answered the wildebeest, shaking with fear.
Next the lion met an elephant.
“Who is the mightiest animal in the jungle?” roared the lion.
The elephant grabbed the lion with his trunk, slammed him repeatedly against a tree, dropped him like a stone and ambled off.
“All right,” shouted the lion. “There’s no need to turn nasty just because you don’t know the answer.”
Aside from the suspension of disbelief required for the dialogues to function at all – none of these animals are known to be able to talk! – there’s an underlying issue
that lions don’t live in jungles. But who cares! That’s not the point of the joke.
Count the lions in this picture. If you found no lions, then you counted correctly. If you got any other number, try again.
In the case of the “paki” joke, the problem could easily be corrected by saying “…they come from Pakistan.” It’d still probably be the worst joke I ever heard, but at
least it’d be trying to improve itself. I remember being about 8 or 9 and explaining this to a classmate, but he wasn’t convinced. As I remember it, he called me a
belm and left it at that.
So that’s the worst joke I ever heard. And now you’ve heard it, you can rest assured that every joke you hear from me – no matter how corny, obscure, long-winded or pun-laden – will at
least be better than that one.
Here’s one last joke, for now:
A woman gets on a bus with her baby. “Ugh!” says the bus driver, “That’s got to be the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!”
The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming and close to tears. She says to a man next to her: “The driver just insulted me! I’m so upset!”
“You go up there and tell him off,” the man replies, “Go on, I’ll hold your monkey for you.”
Things are crazy busy again. No time to blog properly, so here’s a picture that I scribbled on.
Incidentally, I was actually at the concert where this photo was taken, back in 2005. But that’s not actually me in the corner. I was just inspired to make the joke by this comic.
Ah, it’s that time of year again. Here’s a quick round-up of some of my favourite pranks on the web this April Fools’ Day:
ThinkGeek can always be relied upon for a good April Fools’, and this year is no exception. Of their prank products, my
favourite is clearly the Anti-3D glasses, which completely filter out the left
channel from 3D movies, allowing you to watch them in 2D.
Geocachers amongst you might be pleased by the Nano Alarm
container, which sounds a high-pitched alarm when a human body comes near it, making it easier to find. Actually, I’d have found it a more-amusing prank if they’d claimed it detects
interference in GPS signals caused by a nearby GPS receiver.
An article on IPv4.5 claims that we ran out of
IPv4 addresses completely this morning and, with IPv6 still far from fully-deployed, we’re having to implement IPv4.5 as an emergency measure. IPv4.5 shares IP adddresses between
people at opposite sides of the globe, giving priority to those on the “day” side, so there’s a slight risk that some traffic might be mis-directed… but it’ll only be by nocturnal
websurfers who are probably just on Facebook or Twitter anyway.
I’ve found Gay Monopoly on BoardGameGeek, and I’m not sure if it’s a joke or not… BoardGameGeek’s already an April Fools in which they become search engine “Geekdo” (try
searching for “Catan”… or any other board game… on it). The photos of Gay Monopoly look
remarkably believable, but it’s hard to take anything seriously today.
The Pirate Bay has become The Pirat eBay, and has released a blog post claiming that they bought the rights to eBay on eBay and have since re-branded.
Google are well known for their April Fools’ Day pranks, and there are a good number of fantastic ones this year, but my favourite is GMail Motion, motion-sensitive controls based on body movements by which you can interact with your email. Well-worth a look.
Have a great April Fools Day! Play a prank on somebody for me. And, if you don’t want to get caught out yourself, why not install the Do Not Fool add-on for Firefox, which passes a Do-Not-Fool header to every web site you visit, requesting that the site
does not display to you any prank content but only genuine pages.
