A Spanish Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’
‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’
A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun.
Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:
- No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
- The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;
- Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval;
- As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your pay check on accessories for it.
(THIS GETS BETTER!)
The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine (‘el computador’), because:
- In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
- They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves;
- They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem;
- As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.
The women won.
Ello, Thank you for this weeks contribution.
Funny.
Funnier is the attempt to find a Hindi name for a computer. A big battle is going on among pundits. In the meanwhile, street smart people simply call it computer in Hindi using the devnagari script to write it!
I’ve used this one. It’s still funny 🙂
Ramana – I wonder if this will work… कंप्यूटर. Please don’t ask me to pronounce it! Mind you to my ignorant eye, it doesn’t look much different to ग्रंन्य्मर.
Tilly – the good ones go round and round.
Yes, both work!
Where does the mouse come in? In cartoons, it gets the abuse of being the female. What say you?
Ramana – Sweet!
Mayo – Where does the mouse come in? Through the gap in the skirting board, everyone knows that!!
Funny, a friend of mine just sent me the exact same joke. Of course computers are obviously masculine because they show no emotion. You shout and scream at them when they won’t do what you want, and they just sit there impassively waiting for your hysteria to die down.
While the male and female is still debatable in my mind after finishing the joke, I liked Nick’s take best of all. That clinched it for me. Male it is!
Nick – I love it!
Alice – I agree.
My favourite is Irish, a language that stopped developing long before cars (cíar) or busses (Bús) let alone computers (computéir) pronounced comp-u-their were invented.
Barbara – We didn’t have to worry about the word computéir when I was at school, 😉 I was invented long before they were! 😆