No I won't scroll down to read the punchline to your joke. Not even if you add a thousand "!!!!!!!"s in the subject line. (Especially if, actually.)
Is the "scroll down" supposed to be the textual equivalent of a comic pause? Did you learn this from Strunk & White? Does Shakespeare ask his readers to "scroll down" just before the last pair of lines in his sonnets? Does the Bible have a "scroll down" between the Ninth and the Tenth commandments?
You know why they don't have it? Because it's lame. It's lamer than using "..." at the end of every sentence.
So don't make me press the down-arrow key or click that stubborn scroll-wheel on my mouse. I am this close to carpal frickin' tunnel on my right arm and you must not let your joke be the reason I can't wipe my bottom without wincing in pain. Granted, I may NEVER know why blondes fall off their bicycles at night or why Laloo won't sell his cow to Bill Gates, but we have survived for centuries without penicillin and something tells me we will survive this unfortunate gap in human understanding too.
Brother, I swear on the deluxe hardcover edition of "10,001 Best Jokes For All Occasions" that one of these days, I will send you thousands of punchlines without any setups. Your brain will be clogged with absurd one-liners. Your life will be a Beckettian hell as you wait for a context for each of those funny lines. You will be left thrashing around like a blind man searching for a black cat in a dark room.
I will look at you with mild pity and much amusement as you fall on your knees and beg me to tell you the full story of the one-legged talking horse that participated in a beer-drinking contest in Dublin.
Maybe then you will feel my pain.
6 comments:
Er... you wipe your bottom with your right hand?
lamer than the multiple ........s as well.
......
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Joy, perceptive chap, what can I say, some traditions have been discarded since the Egyptians invented payrus.
TR, multiple "..."s are just sad. I also wonder if IMspeak will enter corporate vocabulary 20 years from now. "Our EBITDA is up only 2% :(, but inventories are down 45%, LOLz!"
Fully agree. I hate it when anyone (usually family members with too many forwarded emails in their inbox) sends me those sorts of messages, especially pointless Laloo/Sardar jokes that I've probably read before, have no interest in reading, and only make me feel like hitting the delete button.
I've seriously considered trying to put in a filter on my email account that deletes any message with "Scroll down [insert !!!!!, ...... or something similar here]" in it.
As for IM/email/text message jargon like ur, LOL, ROFL and such - I'm afraid it will enter common vocabulary very soon.
Bring back the Victorian mentality. You know, the one where students got the cane for grammatical transgressions.
LOL, Salil :)), the cane for grammatical transgressions?
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