Orts #761
Guy from the midwest is flying to Boston, and is eager to try some of the fresh seafood he’s heard so much about.
Gets into a cab at the airport and says to the cabbie: “I’m new in town— where’s the best place to get scrod?”
Taxi driver looks at him blankly.
Midwest guy says, “Don’t know what I’m talking about?”
Driver says “Sure I do, been asked a thousand times, just never in the pluperfect subjunctive."
“In some languages,” says the linguistics professor, “a double negative is an affirmative.
In others, a double negative is an emphatic negative.
Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language in which a double affirmative yields a negative.”
A rival professor sitting in the back is heard to mumble, “Yeah, yeah….”
The Good and Great must ever shun
That reckless and abandoned one
Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.
-- Lewis Carroll, in a long poem, The Three Voices