Be Excellent To Each Other

God I'm so good it hurts.

Thats two of you....

I read the Ask Marilyn column in the Sunday paper each week. For a bright girl she pulls some boners. January 23, 2005, she featured a statement by a reader that the term “gullible” does not exist and is not in the dictionary. Marilyn said readers might also look up “gotcha.” Well, I did, and both words are in the OED--that's the Oxford English Dictionary, the global standard--and the big Random House Dictionary. I suppose this is like political conservatives, who prefer to believe that if a concept is not in their limited lexicon, it doesn't exist. Faith is of limited use when it comes to verifiable things, like the existence of words.

Last time I remarked on the “Gullible” bit in an “Ask Marilyn” column. Several readers emailed me: didn't I realize it was a joke? No, I hadn't realized, and so I'll explain why. I made my fortune on humor; I fancy I know a bit about it. To me, something that depends on an untruth is not necessarily funny, just as with jokes that depend on a black man being embarrassed, a fat man slipping on a banana peel, the anatomy of a Jew, a homosexual person's love, or a woman being awkwardly exposed. Indeed, some don't find my frequent fond references to panties to be funny. (The rule is, panties aren't the best thing in life, just next to it.) I have the dictionary habit, and look up words daily, not depending on my fallible memory. I like to be clear-cut with words, as with Humpty Dumpty, except that I don't define their meanings so much as I verify them. I regard them as precision tools. A fellow writer once challenged me on “ploy”; he thought I had made it up. Then there's “bloviation,” which means loud, defiant, boastful talk, blowing, like that in this column; see if you can find that in your dictionary. (I know, I know: it is spelled T H A T.) And would you believe it really is true that there is no such word as “Mundania.” Not in Mundania, there isn't, except among fans. So I looked up gullible, to make absolutely sure, and verified that my memory was correct. So that makes me foolish? Let's extend the principle beyond the dictionary: “Your house is on fire--gotcha!” “Your child was just abducted and killed by a terrorist--gotcha.” “There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--gotcha.” “Social Security is in imminent peril--gotcha.” (Actually it's Medicare/aid in more immediate trouble.) Are we laughing yet? As it happened, a librarian queried Marilyn, also not seeing the humor. Marilyn said she herself had looked up the word, and, evidently discovering what it meant, laughed out loud and passed the joke along. But she won't do it any more. I suspect she got too much feedback like mine, and she's not stupid.

Piers Anthony must be delighted that Dan Brown came along. Because now he's only the second-worst writer on the planet.

Piers Anthony must be delighted that Dan Brown came along. Because now he's only the second-worst writer on the planet.

Maybe everyone's been right all along and I am, in fact, you.

But Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for gullible, so you've fooled no-one.

Maybe he fooled the people who didn't click the link, thinking 'I'm no fool!'.

In those blog entries, Piers Anthony comes across like a colossal dick.

Or someone who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome.

Or someone who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome.

Malc

Does he suffer from that

For those who haven't clicked Lave's link, the Wikipedia page genuinely doesn't exist. That's then joke. It's like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes: the first two aren't funny, the third makes you smile, the fifth you start laughing, and (in my case at least) by the seventh you're strugging to breath.

Here, instead of rakes, we have layers of subterfuge. The old joke about gullible in the dictionary has been reversed, but so has your expectations, because of the old joke. So you don't click, because you know the article will be there; but in fact it really isn't. I think that's ace.

Uh... Wikipedia blatantly does have an entry for gullibility. Otherwise you'd get a page similar to this: Gullible2

I thought the joke was that Wikipedia have left the page there as it is as a joke.

Friday 1pm - Elementary Egg Sucking (at grandma's house)

I've just sneaked a look at Gaywood's diary:

Wiki have fixed it now.