Category Archives: Puns

Puns and Other Forms of Verbal Warfare

Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

Recently, a person I respect very much, and who I consider to be quite good at the rough-and-tumble of verbal sparring, told me something that was either one of the best compliments I’d ever received, or…something else.

What he said was even though he engaged in gentle mockery of others, he would never do it to me, because of the fact that or the way that I would fight back.

I had mentioned ‘mental push hands‘ before, and I mentioned the idea of pushing (or throwing) the listener off-balance. There are a number of ways of doing this[1], of varying levels of pleasantness and effectiveness. Here are a few:

– Insults

In my opinion, it’s generally better to keep the conversation de-escalated and cerebral, as not only do I function best there, if you have any negotiation goals, and are interested in actually getting to yes[2], insults are generally not the way to go.

– Puns

A well constructed pun will make the listener think just enough, by making them return to what they just said, and cross-reference it with what you have just said. For someone who is not prepared for a pun duel, you can make an impression[3], especially if you can have a counter-riposte ready, with appropriate timing, to counter whatever riposte they may perform. You are helped in this that most people pun in areas close to the subject at hand[4].

– Be Boring

Sometimes this exactly what you need. Sometimes you need to take your presentation (usually a presentation), and for every single word in it, find a more ‘professional’ or ‘enterprise’ word. This may be your best option when you’re dealing with a very controversial topic, where no matter which example you use, you’re going to anger someone. Sometimes the only way to slide a concept through is to make it like lukewarm porridge.

So, how do you deal with these?

For insults, my recommendation is de-escalation. There are many other, better writings on the topic, so I will stick to the simple ‘speak calmly and make it about the issue, not the person’.

For Puns, practice! You will be the envy of your friends! Take a random sentence from a book and practice sentence rotation on it! Find a way to refer to a word in a previous sentence without using that word. Read this comic again, and come up with different ripostes.

For boring presentations, I would recommend a deeper knowledge of a topic. In grad. school, I could tell that I progressed between 1st and 2nd year because I started to get something from the Sunday morning talks. (This was at a retreat, where you would arrive Friday night, have talks all day Saturday, then stay up most of the night.) Test yourself on the topic when you are half-asleep. If you can still understand and poke holes in arguments, you’re in good shape.

And that’s it! If you have more types of verbal sparring, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

[1]This assumes that you’re familiar with the standard ‘remember something about the person you’re talking to’, the ‘remember their name’, and the ‘be nice’.

[2]I hear it is an excellent book. I have not read it all the way through, but it is considered the fundamental book on ‘principled negotiation’, as in when you want both/all parties to come to an agreement which is truly best for all involved.

[3]I’ll leave it to you to decide what type of impression it is…

[4]I often say that know just enough about many words to be able to pun with them. This involves spelling, pronunciation, and just enough of a definition/genre/associated words.

#hashtags and @tags

Internet Culture, Puns

Recently[1], the word ‘hashtag’ was added to the Oxford dictionary. For those who are unaware, #hashtags are used to ‘tag’ a post so that it can be more easily searched, or to perform a ‘promotion by crowd’, as the ‘top hashtags’ are shown in various prominent places, such as:

#pants
#pants

This brings the question: If #hashtags are meant to connect a post to a concept, and so that it can be connected to other posts connected to that concept, what are @tags?

In the Slack world (and other IM), @tags are used to notify or summon a person, or to broadcast a message to a group.

So, if #hashtags connect a post to a concept, and @tags are used to notify a person of something, what would $tags[2] be? Or %tags, ^tags, or *tags?

!tags would ideally be used for expressing extra strong feelings about something. I imagine they would start out as the ultimate downvote[3], but then they would be culturally re-appropriated by the new generation to mean the ultimate in positiveness, or coolness, or whatever else they will call it.

~tags will evolve from their original meaning as home directories or webpages on unix servers to mean homepages in general. ‘~nayrb’ would point to this site, for example.

$tags[4] would be appropriated by Amazon for their new ‘one tap purchasing’, where you could purchase any goods mentioned in a post, but even the post itself, perhaps as part of a multilevel marketing scheme. You would end up with post squatters, the scourge of the internet of tomorrow.

%tags are an interesting beast. Like the ‘%’ symbol, they are a link to a concept, but only for a brief period of *time*[5]. So, you could link your post to other posts posted nearby, but only for a while. Like a #hashtag crossed with Snapchat.

^tags go back to the beginning, to the root of things. ^tags are used to end an argument, where you would end a many posts long conversation by posting a final #hashtag on that topic, along with ‘^regulatorycapture’.[6] Can be used in situations similar to those immediately preceding a mic drop.

&tags (not to be confused with &amptags) are multipliers, or ‘amplifiers’. Often connected with ‘micdrop’ tags (-.), they ‘amplify the signal’ of any nearby tags, using an inverse square law to determine nearness and level of effect.

*tags can be substituted for any other tag, and they change depending on context. Under RFC 7168, the implementation of *tags is browser-dependent.

Stay tuned next time, for the riveting differences between (tags, }tags, and ][tags.

[1]2014.

[2]Not $cashtags, that would just be silly.

[3]in the boolean ‘not’ sense of ‘!’

[4]Still not cashtags!

[5]*time* as the Orz would measure it.

[6]Similar to Mornington Crescent, it is critical that the ^tag not be used too soon, or else it will not work as intended.

Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation

Analysis, Internet Culture, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I was talking to G during a life coaching session, and the topic of ‘Opposites’ came up. Specifically, the use of ‘Opposites’ to swap out parts of a sentence to gain more understanding of the sentence, the topic, or perhaps something else.

There are a number of different ways one can swap out parts of a sentence. I’ll go in approximately the order I use them, but the fun ones are at the bottom. 😀

We will use a famous* sentence to illustrate:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”

First, we can start by swapping parts of the sentence:
– Spoonerisms swap the first characters or syllables of words, such as ‘linc and zead’ for ‘zinc and lead’, or ‘The quick frown box jumped over the dazy logs’, which is nonsensical, but highly creative, especially if you drew it.
– One can swap words, swapping the subject and object: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the lazy fox.’), or descriptive words with nouns: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the foxy laze.’) This second one could be nonsensical, but could also refer to lasers, which could trigger other thoughts or creativity in the listener.
– We can completely swap the object half of the sentence: (‘The lazy dogs jumped over the quick brown fox’)
– We can move words around and change their parts of speech: (‘The brown fox quickly jumped over the lazy dogs’), in this case changing the meaning from descriptive/innate (quick fox) to intent (fox quickly).

There are more ways to do this, but they are generally more complex combinations of the above.

Second, we can remove parts of the sentence:
– ‘The brown fox.’
– ‘The fox jumped over the dog.’
– ‘The quickly.’

Third, we can change the cultural referent of the sentence or parts of the sentence:
– ‘The swift vulpine soared over the meddlesome cur.’
– If I knew enough Japanese, I could give examples of different levels of formality here.

Fourthly, we can do what I can only describe as ‘Word Rotation’, where you chose a word in the sentence, and rotate about one of the axes that the word is on, similar to a gimbal or leather punch.
– You can rotate animal species, such as ‘the quick brown bear jumped over the lazy cat’
– You can rotate action words
– You can rotate tightly or loosely:
– Tight: Dog, cat, mouse, hamster
– Loose: Dog, horse, panda, bear**
– Absurd: Dog, mushroom, amphioxus, pool table
– You can rotate senses*** (my favourite, although ‘propriocept’ is not a very good verb.)
– You can take a sub-word and rotate it. This one is clbuttic.
– You can rotate more than once (although this is only very subtly different from rotating once more loosely).
– You can exchange words or word parts for the ‘more formal’ version: ‘Mark my words!’ becomes ‘Marcus my words!’
– Rotation also works with antonyms.

Basically, any way you could #hashtag a word in a sentence, and then replace that word with a different word that also qualified for that #hashtag.

Join us next time, when we explore the mysteries of %tags, and try to figure out whether a single open bracket or closed bracket is more annoying. As always, let me know what you think in the comments below!

*This sentence was commonly used to test typewriters, as it uses each of the letters in the alphabet and is reasonably short and easy to remember.

**Banda, pear.

***Space Quest IV had an icon which alternately allowed you to look, touch, or taste objects. It’s possible this is where my analogy of rotation comes from.

Predictive Punning

Analysis, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I tell many, many, many bad puns, as anyone who has hung out with me knows. What many may not know is how much preparation and mental remapping has gone into this process.

The two key factors in the success of a pun are Timing and Obscurity*.

By Timing, I mean that the pun has to be said close enough to the sentence it is riffing on so that the short term memory of the listeners is willing to go back and look and compare, to find the humour/reference. If you wait too long, you risk your listener timing out** and ignoring you, as they have already forgotten the specifics of the original sentence. Too soon, and the listener has not finished understanding the meaning of the original sentence, and the pun sentence will pass them by.

By Obscurity, I mean that puns which are too obscure will cause the listener to think about the pun for a brief while, then time out and move on. Puns which are too obvious will cause a groan as the pun wave collapses, and the listener will move on. Only a pun somewhere between these, where the listener is subtly forced to engage their brain will get the reaction you desire***.

Complicating matters is that Obscurity is defined differently for each listener****, as each listener will have different amounts of knowledge in each area. So, you’re constantly juggling what you know of the knowledge levels of each of your listeners, and trying to find puns that will fit inside enough of the Timing and Obscurity windows of your audience.

What can help is Sentence Prediction. Just like Amazon can tell that you will need toothpaste before you do, you can predict what words someone will say in a sentence before they know themselves. Once a person has started a sentence and is about halfway through, it is remarkably simple to predict how they will finish the sentence*****. More importantly, it is easy/possible to predict the exact words****** they will use, as you will need the exact words they will use in order to generate your pun.

So, you’re listening to someone speak. Partway through their sentence, you fill in their sentence with what they’re going to say. You then spend the next couple/few seconds planning your pun, you wait until they’re done speaking, and then you strike! Mental chaos ensues! Coyote is happy.

Want to hear more about this? Let me know in the comments below!

*I use ‘Obscurity’ instead of ‘Difficulty’ here because a specific pun will have different ‘Obscurity’ levels for each listener, depending on the specific shape of their knowledge/experiences.

**I’m using ‘Timing Out’ in the sense of the computer term ‘Timeout‘, where after a certain defined period of time, the computer will simply go and do something else. If you want a great example, watch two cats interact. You will see one or both of them timing out on a regular basis.

***If they start hitting you, you’re probably doing this right. Or wrong. It’s all the same. Dada is the anti dada.

****Timing is probably different for each listener as well, but I haven’t studied that in as much depth.

*****I’m sure someone has studied this, but I can’t find a link.

******Incidentally, I quite enjoy the feeling of ‘cache miss‘/’branch misprediction‘ that I get when someone uses a word I don’t expect. It jumbles my neural net and makes me think.

What is the Difference Between a Duck?: Mu Jokes and Mental Push Hands

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Puns, Words!

UPDATE: While I was writing this, this blog passed 1000 page views since I started counting on Dec 29th! You people are awesome!

******************************************************

Yesterday, I briefly touched on the concept of ‘the space between meaning’.

One way to demonstrate this concept is with a Mu-joke (not really an anti-joke*):

Q: What is the difference between a duck**?

A: One of its legs are both the same!

The goal here is to say some words which sound not too much like nonsense, such that the listener really tries to understand.

Like a good pun, you want to draw the listener in by making things the correct level of ‘difficult to understand’. Too easy, the listener groans and moves on. Too difficult, the listener times out and moves on. (Note that this changes with each individual audience member. If ever there was an argument for (education) streaming, this is it. 😀 )

By analogy, you want your Mu-joke to make the listener feel like they would understand it if they ‘just tried a little harder’.

Also, a good Mu-joke will play with language and parts of speech, the goal being to make the listener more aware of the structure and inner meaning of what they are saying and what is being said around them. Normally, the word ‘between’ refers to two things, but we are using it to refer to one object, a duck. This gives the listener a mental ‘cache miss‘ or ‘branch misprediction‘ error, and it can throw them off balance as they try to reassemble their mental model of the conversation.

This trick can be used in a ‘Mental Push Hands***’ competition. I have fond memories of doing this with MC as we reshelved books at the library in high school. I suspect many of the best debaters use variants of this, and the best politicians have well-developed defenses against these kinds of tactics.

But back to ‘the space between meaning’. It is the space in your head where you are comfortable with ‘between’ referring to any number of things, where you are comfortable with ‘both’ referring to one thing.

It is a space I enjoy, and I hope you can help put me there. 😀

*Anti-jokes are not quite what I mean. They seem to be defined online as jokes with a standard leadup and an opposite-ish punchline. Many of the punchlines seem to take a ‘standard’ punching-down joke and subvert it. Funny, interesting, useful, but not what I’m taking about.

**I first saw this joke in one of those ‘choose-your-own-adventure-rpg’ books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grailquest. Probably my favourite series in the genre.

***I learned ‘Push Hands’ as a martial arts balance exercise. You plant your feet and touch palms with your opponent. The object is to make your opponent move one of their feet without moving yours. For me, it was all about being as flexible as possible while trying to find my opponent’s inflexibilities.

Wikipedia Humour

Idle Speculation, Puns, Reviews, Thoughts on Thoughts

My favourite page on Wikipedia is the description of the ‘Lamest Edit Wars’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

Wikipedia is a treasure trove of (very) dry humour about often very controversial topics. Normally, if you’re in a conversation about a controversial topic, you can step out, but not an encyclopedia, which is expected to have words on everything.

You can see the workshopping that must have gone into it. I wonder if there are ways to detect the most workshopped phrases? To detect the ‘most controversial*’ parts of Wikipedia? (Although parsing the revision history may give you this.)

“Both frequencies coexist today (Japan uses both) with no great technical reason to prefer one over the other[1] and no apparent desire for complete worldwide standardization.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency

If you enjoyed the humour above, you may also enjoy (hattip to AM):

https://github.com/bup/bup#things-that-are-stupid-for-now-but-which-well-fix-later

And my favourite subreddit of them all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/notinteresting

It is truly sublime, including such gems as:
“checking the radiator pipe cover”

radiator

*It turns out that Wikipedia has a list of these (of course it does): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues
This is different from controversies about Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies
There are even articles in reputable news sources written about this: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/tech/web/controversial-wikipedia-pages/ And research papers: http://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566v1.pdf

Ballroom Blintz

Cooking, Puns

ballroom_blintz

So, last year I made Nalysnyky* for Orthodox Ukranian Christmas**, based on an excellent (and very forgiving!) recipe provided by Tori Avery here:

Cheese Blintzes

I made a few changes to the recipe for various reasons, and I figured I’d copy it below.

Basically, Nalysnyky and Blintzes are some sort of filling wrapped in a crêpe. I chose cottage cheese*** instead of the Ricotta and Creme cheese suggested by the original recipe. My proportions may be a little different, as well. I feel like there’s something slightly missing in the filling, but I’m not sure what it is. They were still a hit at Christmas dinner last year and this year. (Last year, S and I made ourselves sick eating them, but they were oh so tasty. 😀 ) Both last year and this year, I made a double batch. IIRC, this makes 15-18 blintzes, more than enough to satisfy 7 and leave many left over for snacks.

This is a very forgiving recipe. You mix things in a bowl, the exact proportions don’t really matter, and you can pause partway through and nothing much will go wrong (assuming nothing is actively burning in your frying pan). The first time I made them, I had long pauses between steps (as it was my first time doing a new recipe in a long time), the second time, I only used a timer about 1/3 of the time, trusting in my ability to read butter cooking temperature (browns and crackles at 375 F), and how well done a crepe was.

Cooking utensils:
– Measuring cups
– Whisk and a lot of patience, or a blender or mixer capable of dispersing flour clumps from solution
– Frying pan (non-stick is better)
РPlates to store partially made cr̻pes
– Wax paper to put between crepes so that they do not stick to each other (essential if you’re saving time by only cooking one side of the crêpe to start
– Plates and paper towel to de-butter and store freshly cooked

Garnishes:
– Fruits, especially strawberries and raspberries
– Thawed blueberries, pineapple, and mango worked well today (just remember to thaw them completely)

Thinking about it, if you wanted to do this assembly-line style, you could have two frying pans on the go, one making the shells, one frying the results.

Crêpe shell ingredients:
– 4 eggs
– 1 cup flour
– 1/3 cup sugar
– 3/4 cup milk (I used lactose-free milk, for reasons)
– 1/4 cup water (I used H2O, for reasons)
– 1 tsp vanilla
– Pinch of salt

Cooking requirements
Р1-2 sticks of butter (I used two full sticks for a double batch. About 85% to cook the cr̻pes and the rest to fry the filled cr̻pes.)

You could also use whatever oil suits you. We used olive oil the first time we made them, to good effect.

Filling ingredients:
– 1 tub (500g) of cottage cheese (I used organic 2%)
– 1/4 cup sugar
– (Here, the original calls for an egg yolk. I’m not sure why. I left it out.)
– 1/2 lemon, mostly squeezed into the mix (original called for 2 tsp)
– 1 tsp vanilla (I put in a little extra****)
– Pinch of salt

1) Mix all the crêpe shell ingredients in a mixing bowl.
2) Stir these ingredients until no flour lumps remain. (I couldn’t get them all out, but they still ended up fine. You’ll get better consistency if you do this step more assiduously.)
3) While stirring, turn on your frying pan/skillet to 375F. (On our stove, this is 2.5 stops below half, but really, it’s wherever butter browns but doesn’t burn. I learned this from many years of making pancakes growing up, YMMV.)
4) Apply enough butter to the bottom of the frying pan/skillet to make a thin layer for cooking. You can tell by the fact that it is sizzling and slightly browning and coating the bottom of the pan.
5) Pour 1/3 cup of crêpe shell mix onto the frying pan/skillet, then add a bit more, perhaps up to 1/2 cup (this will make the shell slightly larger and easier to fit filling into
6) Wait 60-75 seconds (I set my microwave timer for 55***** seconds), or until the crêpe can be flipped without displacing uncooked liquid on its top (If you wish, you don’t need to cook both sides of the crêpe at this stage, you can cook the inside, add the filling, then cook the outside later, which may save you 15-30 mins, if you’re really organized).
7) While this is cooking, take a sheet of wax paper, and get it ready to receive the crêpe.
8) Flip the crêpe, and cook the other side for 60-75s.
9) Take the crêpe off the frying pan and place it on the holding plate and/or wax paper

10) Repeat steps 4-9 until all the crêpe batter is exhausted.

11) While you are cooking the crêpes, you can mix up the crêpe filling:
12) Stir the filling ingredients in a mixing bowl. You may want to add different amounts than above, to taste.

13) Put a small amount (one spoon’s worth) of the filling onto the lower middle of one of the crêpes. Fold the bottom part of the crepe over the middle, then each of the sides in, then fold the bottom ‘pocket’ up until the crêpe is rolled up like a burrito around the filling.

14) Melt about 1/3 of a stick of butter into the pan (this should be enough to cover the bottom of the pan…Add more if you want to brown more of the nalysnyky during frying).

15) 3 of the filled crêpes should fit in your pan. Cook for 1.5-2 minutes
16) Flip the filled crêpes, cook for another 1.5-2 minutes

17) Dry the excess butter onto a paper towel

18) Serve warm, with fruit, or whatever other garnish you wish!

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalysnyky

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Choice_of_December_25_date

***It might have been this page, or another, which suggested the substitution: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/212387/cottage-cheese-blintzes/

****Or a little ‘extract’? 😀

*****I have a personal rule that I must press the fewest number of microwave number buttons whenever I program a countdown. This leads to interesting regions like 0:55, 0:66, 1:11, 0:77, where you get some nice overlap. Usually, though, it’s 0:33, 0:99, and 0:55.

The Six Answers to a ‘Yes or No’ Question

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

There exist the traditional five answers to a ‘Yes or No’ question:

– ‘Yes’, indicating complete agreement
– ‘No’, indicating complete disagreement
– ‘Maybe’, indicating something in between on that axis
– ‘I don’t know’, indicating a lack of relevant information
– ‘Mu*’, or ‘unask the question, it contains an incorrect assumption’

Recently, J EB (nee K) mentioned that ‘like’ is a new answer to a yes/no question. (On my post ‘No Spoilers Awaken’)

The Facebook ‘like’ seems to mean a number of different, sometimes overlapping things…
– ‘I like this post and I want you to know’
– ‘I agree with you’
– ‘I’m curious to hear the answer to this question’
– ‘I support you’
– ‘I understand your feelings’

It is very clear (to me) that ‘like’ is a valid answer to a ‘Yes or No’ question, and it is most delightfully ambiguous. It feels more discovered than invented, as we’ve always had ‘interesting question’, it was just rarely expressed by random people around the world, in response to a conversation they are not explicitly a part of.

*For those who wish a slightly more formal treatment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29 specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29#.22Unasking.22_the_question

You may also be interested in the somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-valued_logic

But my favourite is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong (Thanks DJ!) This is one way to say ‘Mu’, but usually only if you’re trying to be insulting.

Solution Rotation

Idle Speculation, Puns, Science!, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

So, sometimes when someone asks me a question, I feel like I’m rotating through a number of possible solutions/solution types, like rotating through different options in a leather punch. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=leather+punch

I first noticed this in a conversation with Garland Marshall, one of my favourite profs. at WashU: https://biochem.wustl.edu/faculty/faculty/garland-marshall. He’d asked me a question about how one would determine the structure of a binding site of a molecule too difficult to crystallize, too large to NMR, and impossible to get a structure with a bound ligand.

How do you come up with the structure of the binding site? I remember rotating through a number of different options, mostly focused on polling the ligand in various ways.

– Does this happen to other people?
– Is there a neuronal definition/description of this?
– What does this mean?
– Other types of analogies?

On the ‘neuronal pathway’ front, it could be something like activating different pathways in sequence, doing it manually, rather than letting your brain activate all of them at the same time, then aggressively pruning them (to save energy). So, you would actively control your thoughts, to try out each channel independently, and submit them to more rigorous logic, to make sure you hadn’t left anything out. Somewhat like taking the ‘mental shackles off’, asking an audience ‘what ideas would your most creative and silly friend have about what to do with a brick?’, rather than ‘what ideas would you have about what to do with a brick*?’

*This seems to have been adapted from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thinking