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Humanist Archives: Jan. 26, 2019, 7:52 a.m. Humanist 32.383 - humour not to be bent, folded or mutilated

                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 383.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2019-01-25 17:11:48+00:00
        From: David Hoover 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.380: humour?

I can't resist passing along a piece of groanfull humor I ran across back
in the days of the 2000 US presidential election catastrophe. I was asked
by CBS news to research the etymology/meaning of "chad" (hanging or not).
It probably comes from a Scottish word meaning gravel, but the acronym
etymology, "card hole aggregate debris" was fun, if almost certainly
erroneous, as most acronym etymologies are. In my research I came across a
fascinating rock band called "Chad Hollerith and the Perferations." You can
read about them here: http://www.hhhh.org/music/chad.html.

Enjoy,
David Hoover

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 1:31 AM Humanist  wrote:

>                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 380.
>             Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
>                    Hosted by King's Digital Lab
>
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2019-01-24 19:49:16+00:00
>         From: Francois Lachance 
>         Subject: The Place of Humour in Humanities Computing
>
> Willard,
>
> I have been trawling through the literature on overlapping hierarchies and
> have repeatedly come across puns and other forms of humour. One of the
> outstanding examples comes from Steve deRose
>
> [quote]
> This model, originally named HORSE (Hierarchy-Obfuscating Really Spiffy
> Encoding) may seem wooden at first, but soon it comes to look quite
> natural. With its spartan syntax it should be attractive; but its name
> seems less so, and clearly a Muse meant us to rename this model
>
>                             CLIX
>
> because of its heavy use of point events scattered throughout the text or
> data stream: click, clicks, clix.
> [/quote]
>
> The acronym in itself is funny but even more humorous given that it is
> part of an extended conceit playing with a name: "This approach, which
> after Troy [Griffiths] is called 'Trojan milestones'".  From "Markup
> Overlap: A Review and a Horse" (2004)
>
> http://xml.coverpages.org/DeRoseEML2004.pdf
> ml
>
> Quite apart from the pleasure of sharing such delightful wordplay, I am
> intrigued about the general question about the place of humour in the
> exchanges between scholars (one is reminded of Erasmus's play on the name
> of More in The Praise of Folly) and, in a more contemporary view, its
> place in particular in the making of humanities computing. Keen on
> learning more about any jokes that cross linguistic boundaries.
>
> --
> Francois Lachance
> Scholar-at-large

--
 David Hoover, Professor of English  NYU Eng. Dept. 212-998-8832
         david.hoover@nyu.edu https://files.nyu.edu/dh3/public/

Adolph slid back into the thicket and lay down behind a fallen log to
see what would happen. Not much ever happened to him but weather.
--Willa Cather



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