Ooh missus, get a grip on my notifications YOU LOVE IT YOU SLAG This was, as alert followers of my column may recall, the first SMS text message I ever received on my first ever mobile phone, sometime during the last century. I did not bother to find out who sent it to me. It was a wrong number, of course... but not knowing with absolute certainty ensures that the …
English is particularly full of opportunities for puns. Probably more than any other language due to its mongrel heritage that needs a thesaurus for dinosaur meanings. The "Carry On" films were popular in other countries - but most of the verbal and visual puns passed unnoticed. The cultural context has probably changed even for a modern UK audience.
The original French "Asterix The Gaul" books were full of puns. Translators into the many other languages often had to invent their own puns based on local context. The first Swedish "Asterix and Cleopatra" translation failed to understand that puns were necessary. The second version found the right spirit.
Asterix was brilliant for the different levels of humour. Kids love the cartoons, adults loved the puns and the comedic names.
On a related note of Carry-On levels of humour, as I was driving to work this morning I passed a lorry for a timber merchant. Their slogan is "Wood. Just the Way You Like It." In the words of Eric Idle, say no more!
You have not deal with Slavic languages - especially Russian. Everything has 5+ meanings and everything is a double entendre. That made the life of censors in USSR lots and lots of fun :) Though even that cannot excuse them for allowing such gems as:
"Our history is a fairy tale, sprinkled with a few decorations of truth" (from this one: http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0081256/)
I bet the poor guy who let that one through got fired shortly thereafter :)
You havent tried Mandarin then.
My wifes name means "Red Swan", or possibly "Flying Fruit".
Actually, there are dozens of possible meanings, but I like to tease her with the "Flying Fruit" one.
Thats not a gimp mask, just me having acupuncture.
None of them are that important that I need to be jogged out of whatever I'm doing to attend to them. If it really is important try dialling the number and talk to me. App notifications get disabled the first time they make my phone vibrate or make unwanted noise, if the app is important I'll check it on a fairly regular basis.
Up vote! Why is it that every guy developing an app is convinced that it needs to notify me EVERY time it does something?
Or, in the case of news media apps, every time something happens to a footballer I don't care about, or in a far-flung country of even less interest.
That gave me a most brilliant idea for a research paper on Quantum Steganography, only I now see that someone's already done it. But I suppose that technically the topic here is anti-steganography, so maybe there's still an angle...
Wikipedia explains it quite succinctly: LOL is an acronym or abbreviation for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love". The "lots of love" variant is still in use by some people I know who were born in the 1940s. I suspect (but can't be sure) that "LOL = lots of love" was in use long before the Internet was made available to the general public.
I know this is a bit radical, and it may be a step too far, but you can get phones nowadays that have buttons with all the letters of the alphabet on them. (I keep as an emergency backup in the car an old Palm Pre 2 which works for phone and text, has a full keyboard and is the size of an old style phone. There are others for people who want nothing else, though some of them are now getting quite expensive in good condition).
I was in a Ford last week that had a built in satnav...and it had a 0-9 keyboard using the old phone key letters. What were they thinking? "We can use the software off a 1990 fax machine?"? Or "who wants user friendliness?" Do I really want an average of 15 button presses to enter a postcode?
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