Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 18:52:29 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan Hubbard), bright@wintelcom.net (Alfred Perlstein), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fortune candidate from #FreeBSD on EFNet Message-ID: <200011081852.LAA21953@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <xzp66lys58p.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> from "Dag-Erling Smorgrav" at Nov 08, 2000 07:12:06 PM
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> > The basis of the joke required people to complete an _English_ > > phrase in their mind to make the association. I maintain that > > the joke is anglocentric. > > This is absolute, complete, utter, first-rate US-centric bullshit. > "The Lord works in mysterious ways" (independently of the rest of your > quote) is a colloquial expression in France and Norway, and probably > in other european countries as well. I don't know why you have it in for me for the past couple of days, but I have to say that the rabid ad hominim attacks getting tiring. The _precise_ quote Alfred posted from IRC was: | 09:26 #freebsd mcmc> god works in mysterious ways | 09:26 #freebsd mcmc> freebsd on the other hand, has man pages I think even you will have to agree that the text quoted above was written in English. > Jordan is hardly a statistically representative cross-section of > the FreeBSD community. Perhaps it was merely an example of his "fairings" humor, in which he was pretending to be "mystified". I rather suspect that his posting was made tongue in cheek; I only made mine because, while his posting had a high probability of being a joke, there were, IMO, people who would not have gotten the original joke, and I liked it enough to want them to get it. > I'm tempted to theorise that the phrase did not originate with the > book you quoted, but rather that its author used an expression his > readers were already familiar with. Feel free; if you can find a reference which predates 1687, in any language, I'll be happy to reference it instead. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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