a joke about two pere ubuists

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

--- Keith McMullen <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> Oh my brain is like an orange orange pumpkin, /
> that's
> newly sprung up in a corn field along with the
> yellow
> brick toad. 
> 
> 
> I am like a red tin bus
> made in Taiwan
> people's faces are painted on
> but they're painted on in alarm
> people would see me they'd say
> Man who's that crazy bus driver
> sittin in that bus driver's seat


The linguist can explain the combination of words
like "I" and "am" and "a red tin bus" and why these do
or do not meet our intuitive norms for grammaticality.
But are not these words in combination beautiful? Is
not the turn at the word "but" (line 4) where the bus
is said to have faces painted on it "in alarm" a
marvelous ambiguity? A U-Turn. Are such beautiful
metaphors merely  mechanisms in our nervous system,
limited by the size and shape of us, by the way in
which we move? Something in the way she moves. Listen
to that. It's so beautiful that song writers have used
it again and again. My sweet lord, she's so0 fine. 

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" 

This is the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. 
An overworked metaphor is stood on its head and Willy
has satirized Elizbethan Soneteers. It refuses to be a
mecahanism by being one only in satrical form. 

My great grandmother is an infant. 

>From a strictly "grammatical POV, this statement is
utter nonsense. 

But read as metaphor, the implication of chronological
age can be ignored and the focus shifted to the
helplessness of the old bag. 

And when 

Growling flowers and green ideas sleep furiously. 

One can try to measure the conscious and unconscious 
combinations of similarity and disimilarity and claim
that these are in fact limited by the size and sahpe
of our  bodies, our embodied brains and where they
have been, the mechanisms of our nervous systems, but
it seems to me that humans are not content with these
limitations and that is why we invented poetry and
drama and fictions. 

A laboratory linguist from Main
shot red tin buses in his vein
now he stops and he stammers
at every corner but grammars
and man that bus driver is crazy


Can you imagine, since 1970 these guys have been in a
language lab studying input? Goodness me. I'd put them
on the number 7 train in NYC, a single ride from Times
Square to Shea Stadium and they will have enough data
to blow their minds for another 33 years. 

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more
http://taxes.yahoo.com/