Humor

This cartoon appeared today in my Facebook feed: I’m posting it on Linguistrix because it’s a rather cute display of syntactic ambiguity, and for a change, it’s in Hindi. Syntactic ambiguity is when a particular sentence can be parsed in more than one grammatically correct ways, each with a different meaning. A popular example is I shot an elephant in my pajamas, which has not two but three parsings—either I was wearing my pyjamas, or the elephant was inside my pajamas, or that the elephant was wearing my pajamas.

A couple of days ago, I saw the Olive Oil/Baby Oil meme resurfacing on Facebook. For those not familiar with it, it shows the image of a rather shocked looking baby with the caption If olive oil is made of olives, then… what is baby oil made of? My heart goes out to the baby, because compound nouns in English can be very very tricky. There is no standard form for interpreting the meaning of a compound noun X-Y.

A pic was shared like crazy on Facebook in the last few weeks— This comic is factually incorrect, but it’s a good demonstration of how most people are confused about what actual Active and Passive voice is, and mostly just assume it to be random rearrangement of words. In the comic, the teacher asks the students to give examples of Active Voice and Passive Voice. The smartass kid replies with two lines from the song _Tere mast mast do nain_ from the movie Dabangg, thereby also complimenting his teacher’s eyes.

When you combine an awesome Harry Potter reference with Spanish phonology, you get a winner. This has got to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the recent past: Since this is Linguistrix, let me add a few lines about the points of linguistic interest in this gag. Spanish pronunciation is delightfully easy and predictable with a very regular spelling system. Words usually have only one stressed syllable, and it is the last syllable, except when the word ends in N or S or a vowel, in which case it's the penultimate syllable (Michel Thomas calls this rule the Nose Rule).

If you’ve been online on FB/Twitter today, you must have noticed that the Indian part of the inter-web has gone crazy over a supposed screenshot from a Star News telecast. I say supposed because my Facebook feed has been flooded with all kinds of stupidity in the last few days—from images of Gods magically appearing on the top of mountains to claims that Louis Braille was an Italian king—so naturally I have developed a deep distrust of all society.

Enough. You have troubled us enough. Yes, you. Don’t run away. I am talking about you only. Everytime you are going for dinner with us, you will be nuisance whole time. First you will make sarcastic comments—”Why are you looking in menu card? anyhow you will eat only paneer”. Then you will pounce on our food also. When waiter comes with non-veg food, you will give silly smiles and ask him to serve to you only but when he comes with veg food you will tell him to serve to everyone.