Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Just remembered an old puzzle

Punctuate this:

time flies i can't they fly too fast

current book: A Maggot, by John Fowles

9 comments:

  1. Time flies, like an arrow; Fruit flies like a banana...

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  2. "Time flies? I can't; they fly too fast!"

    That doesn't look right nor makes any sense. Tell me how.

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  3. mujibmk's is ok, but i can look at it as a conversation between two people: -
    "Time flies".
    "I can't. They fly too fast."
    what this means is, this bloke asks another bloke to time flies...as in, take a timer and calculate how fast flies are flying. the second bloke of course thinks the first bole is bonkers, and tries giving a legitimate excuse for not timing flies. So there....

    I repeat, mujibmk's version is correct too.:-D

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  4. Bingo !

    Or, put a question mark after Time flies, to eliminate the second bloke from the conversation.

    "Time flies ? I can't do that ! They fly too fast."

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  5. I brought two blokes into the picture because:-

    a) Two heads are always better than one.
    b) it's much more interesting, trying to imagine this as a Laurel-Hardy kind of a conversation...amazing possibilities of "what happens next?" :-D

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  6. >Time flies, like an arrow; Fruit flies like a banana...

    There shouldn't be a comma after 'Time flies' - the sentence doesn't make sense then. Otherwise it's vintage Groucho....

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  7. nice! thanks.

    they key is the '?' after 'time flies' i guess.

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  8. oops. thx for the correction. i had no idea it was a marxism!

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  9. So I was correct without understanding the meaning. I hadn't thought of Musca domestica and that's why it didn't make any sense. Silly me.

    How did the quiz go?

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