Above the Law comments, apropos the prostitution advertising case, “If you need advertisements to help point you in the direction of prostitutes in a state where prostitution is legal, then something is wrong with your wang.”
And this reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. A man is on his first visit to Boston, and he wants to try some of that delicious New England seafood that he’d long heard about. So he gets into a cab, and asks the driver, “Can you take me to where I can get scrod?” The driver replies, “I’ve heard that question a thousand times, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
anonymous says:
“Hello? Is this voice-amplification apparatus functioning? Hello? (Tough crowd this evening.)”
March 11, 2010, 6:31 pmProsecutorial Indiscretion says:
Your joke is a hell of a lot funnier than Elie’s, and makes more sense to boot.
March 11, 2010, 6:44 pmCrunchy Frog says:
There is a reason that law professors are law professors, and comedians are comedians.
Doctor! My brain hurts!
March 11, 2010, 6:48 pmMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Enh. I always edit that one to get rid of “pluperfect subjunctive.” My punchline is something like “Been driving this cab thirty years, and I find out only now that it’s an irregular verb.”
March 11, 2010, 8:01 pmShelbyC says:
It’s an irregular verb if you do it right.
March 11, 2010, 8:08 pmmatth says:
Yeah, I don’t really get why “scrod” suggests the pluperfect subjunctive.
Not really on-topic, but I just saw an even more painful pluperfect subjunctive joke for those who speak french. (Forgive the absence of accents): “Il eut fallu que je le susse”, which is pretty funny on its own terms, becomes even funnier if you mis-conjugate the pluperfect subjunctive of falloir as “eut fallusse.”
March 11, 2010, 9:18 pmFub says:
I’m fairly certain that joke is older than you are. I first heard it over 45 years ago.
Had I never gotten scrod I wouldn’t either.
March 11, 2010, 10:13 pmSteve says:
There seems to be some confusion. “One of my favorite jokes” is not a claim of ownership.
March 11, 2010, 10:31 pmbillo says:
I know this will mark me as a complete geek, but when I was in medical school, I used to haunt the old library stacks and read medical journals from the 1800s, just because I liked the writing. In the 1845 edition of the American Journal of Insanity, there was an article on the poetry of the inmates of Bedlam Asylum. One of the poems listed was by Nat Lee. It was the first time I had ever heard of the subjunctive mood. I’ve later heard that it predates Lee by some time and is anonymous.
Here’s one rendition:
Oh that my lungs could bleat like buttered peas;
But bleating of my lungs hath caught the itch,
And are as mangy as the Irish seas
That offer wary windmills to the rich.
I grant that rainbows being lulled asleep,
Snort like a woodknife in a lady’s eyes;
Which makes her grieve to see a pudding creep,
For creeping puddings only please the wise.
Not that a hard-roed herring should presume
To swing a tithe-pig in a catskin purse;
For fear the hailstones which did fall at Rome,
By lessening of the fault should make it worse.
or ’tis most certain winter woolsacks grow
From geese to swans if men could keep them so,
Till that the sheep-shorn planets gave the hint
To pickle pancakes in Geneva print.
Some men there were that did suppose the skie
Was made of carbonadoed antidotes;
But my opinion is, a whale’s left eye,
Need not be coined all King Harry groats.
The reason’s plain, for Charon’s western barge
Running a tilt at the subjunctive mood,
Beckoned to Bednal Green, and gave him charge
To fasten padlocks with Antarctic food.
T
he end will be the millponds must be laded,
To fish for white pots in a country dance;
So they that suffered wrong and were upbraided
Shall be made friends in a left-handed trance.
That’s a version I found on the net. The one I remember from the American Journal of Insanity actually went something like:
March 11, 2010, 10:49 pmO! That my brain would bleat like buttered peas
And that by bleating catch the itch
And grow dark and mangy as the Irish seas
To engender whirlwinds from some Northern Witch…
leo marvin says:
I wouldn’t worry about exposing your geekitude on a site where the punchline of the main blogger’s favorite joke is, “but I never heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
March 11, 2010, 11:35 pmMichael Dunn says:
As a longtime professional editor, I thought I’d heard all the language and linguistic jokes, or at least the funny ones, but this is new to me. Thanks.
March 12, 2010, 12:37 amMalvolio says:
Yes, formally the joke makes no sense. In the sentence “Where can I get scrod?”, the cabbie is apparently taking “get scrod” as the periphrastic passive voice of “screw”. There’s no real reason for that; the closest parallel I can think of is “trod” as the past participle of “tread” and that’s pretty far away.
And why “pluperfect” as I always heard that joke or “pluperfect subjunctive” in Eugene’s version? Pluperfect subjunctive is used to indicate a counterfactual past, e.g. “If I had screwed”, not the situation here at all.
My theory is that “pluperfect” is just a funny word, just as ducks, hippos, and certain northern city (Saskatchewan, Walla Walla, Sheboygan) are inherently funny. If you call someone an asshole, you just sound vulgar; call him a pluperfect asshole, and that’s fine wit indeed.
March 12, 2010, 3:59 amBradPatrick says:
This joke is a favorite of mine too, but I first heard it as a diss on Hahvahd, and thus the city identified was Cambridge.
March 12, 2010, 8:04 amKevin R says:
As Dave Barry put it, “‘Weasel’ is funny. Compare ‘Richard Nixon wearing a necktie’ to ‘Richard Nixon wearing a neck weasel’.”
March 12, 2010, 9:01 amcorneille1640 says:
“Pi is exactly 3!”
March 12, 2010, 9:37 amJust Dropping By says:
Nitpick – Saskatchewan is a province, not a city. Maybe you’re thinking of Saskatoon (the largest city in Saskatchewan), although the Saskatchewan community I hear used in jokes the most is Moose Jaw.
March 12, 2010, 10:51 amJohn D says:
I want to nit-pick the telling. The punch line is wrong for the set up. Cab drivers don’t speak like that.
As a Bay Stater, I’m familiar with several variations of the joke. The punch line, as offered, better fits this variation:
* In the traditional telling of the joke, this is pronounced “thutty.”
Alternate punchline:
“So do I, but I didn’t know that was the past tense.”
And face it, it’s dirtier if the characters in the joke are women. Cabbies are expected to be crude. Our assigned text is The Rationale of the Dirty Joke.
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March 12, 2010, 12:49 pmFub says:
I think that “trod” is the the correct participle to form the pluperfect past subjunctive, eg: “Had I trod on it, the snake would have bitten me.”
True for the form of the question in the joke. The question “Where might I have gotten scrod?” would more accurately reflect the cabbie’s grammatical analysis. But it is a joke, and gets some leeway for precision.
Ditto.
It’s almost doubled. Sell now or you’ll be scrod when the market becomes rational again. Or irrational again. Or something. I blame Obamanomics.
March 12, 2010, 1:01 pmBZ says:
Or as Zall’s Third Law:
“A dirty book is seldom dusty.”
(Others include: “How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on” and “When you get a mouthful of hot soup, the next thing you do will be wrong.”)
March 12, 2010, 2:22 pmleo marvin says:
That’s kind of the point. A good joke creates expectations its punchline pulls the rug out from under.
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March 28, 2010, 11:07 pmDenis says:
This is all so silly. The essence of the original joke as told by Mr. Volokh is apparently missed by many commenters here. I howled when I read it this morning, never having heard it before. Regardless of the real, theoretical meaning of pluperfect, the joke is perfect because it asserts the ridiculous, that a cabbie in an Ivy Leagueish city would assert his own elitist and mistaken interpretation of “screw”. Anyone with even the slightest linguistic savvy would avoid any further scrutiny.
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