Thursday 8 March 2012

Born to pun (London, UK)

This morning, Emily and I touched upon the subject of punctuation in Chinese.  I said it is a borrowing from Western conventions, and that classical Chinese texts did not have any punctuation at all.  She was greatly surprised and said, "What?!  No commas?"  Nope, I said.  "No semi-colons?"  No.  "No colons?"  I said, "No punctuation full stop," then realised what I'd just said!


(London, 2012)


Update120312:  Tiffany, my serious rival as Queen of Recycling, said she had a whole box of perfectly good envelopes which some company had thrown out because they'd done the labels wrongly, and would I like to have them?  Yes, I'll pick them up on Saturday, I said.  Unfortunately she also gave me a lot of other things, as she's moving out of London, so I had to leave the envelopes behind, as well as a huge bag of clothes Mrs Sun had given me for Congo.  On Sunday, Tiffany sent an email asking if she should deliver the envelopes to me on Monday and if she could ring up a charity to collect the clothes as they're too heavy for me to lug home.  I replied about the clothes but forgot about the envelopes, so had to send another email, saying without thinking, "Sorry I forgot to address the issue of the envelopes in my earlier email," then realised I'd done another pun.  They're just tripping off my tongue these days!  (^_^)


Update 051112:  I started working part-time in a pub on Saturday, and a group of Russians asked me, after sitting down, if they could play chess in the pub.  Without thinking, I said to them, “I’ll check,” then winked at them as I realised what I’d done.  (They smiled, but I’m not sure if their English was up to the level of punning.)  Not that one is allowed to be so familiar with the customers anyway, but if my brain had been sharper, I should’ve said, “I’ll check, mate.”

No comments:

Post a Comment