The silliest age
Could be the Age of Reason.
No. Strike that. I’m just being silly.
After all, it is Silly Saturday.
The question is, really, how does one learn to be silly? Is it a natural talent, or a learned behavior?
Today, we find some enlightenment from Guy Browning at The Guardian.
We’ll let him speak for himself in his aptly titled article:
I do think he’s got a point, though—if not several.
Don’t you?
Is there anything better than a bad joke?
Except it has to be a good bad joke. Like this one from a website purporting to have 86 of the World’s Best Jokes:
Which day of the week do fish hate?
Fry-day
Imagine rimshot here…and a groan.
Huh?
TIALY is an acronym my friend, Amy, and I use. Amy had some wrist issues, once upon a time, and was using a dictation program to type. If you’ve ever used a dictation program, you know that they are prone to errors. This particular one, however, has entered our email and texting lexicon. (I don’t mean the universal “our;” just Amy’s and mine.)
What Amy was trying to write was “This is hilarious.”
What the software heard was “This is a Larry, yes?”
It just struck us funny. We laughed and laughed. And then we decided that the comparative and superlative forms for conveying electronic amusement are:
LOL
ROFL
and…
TIALY!
None of which really has anything to do with this post, but I thought you needed to understand the headline. And I don’t really have that much to say about this Friday’s Find, except that I find it hilarious.
It’s a term of art. (‘Term of art’ is sort of the same thing as saying ‘technical terminology’ but, hey, we all know that I, for one, prefer art.)
It’s a term of art in the world of typesetting.
The term is CamelCase.
I don’t know why, but I find it highly amusing. (Probably goes back to that old vaudeville tenet that K sounds are funny.*)
Anyway, if you haven’t encountered this term before it’s the term for what you see there—CamelCase —where there is a capital letter in the middle of a word. Like ‘iPod’—a very famous example of CamelCase.
It’s called that because the capital in the middle reminded somebody of the hump on a camel’s back.
And because “camel” is funny.
TIALY!
According to children.
This has been bouncing around the internet for a while, so it’s entirely possible you may have seen it. I always like to revisit it, however, and it is an entirely perfect candidate for Silly Saturdays.
I think the following are among my favorites—because they seem to be true as well as funny:
He [Saint Paul] preached holy acrimony,
Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. As a queen she was a success.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.
and
Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility.
But there is a lot more inventive history there, so click on that link and enjoy!
