Burning Questions 3: The Slashening
Yes, yes, line up your questions. They will be shot. Dani asks: "If Who's on first, and What's on second, then Who's on third?" Well, given that the Doctor is a time traveler, Who's both on first and on third at the same time. Thus, your 'question' is actually a statement, and therefore an invalid entry into this little pastime. You may be excused.
AllieKat asks: "Why is it we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?" I'm afraid, sweetie, that the answer is "Because human beans are idiots with no sense of propriety." In the same way that the word 'hella' *shudder* has wormed its fetid way into the common parlance, the whole driveway/parkway foolishness has remained in common object nomenclature simply through usage. I blame regionalism.
When the humans started gathering into groups and forming villages, language could be counted upon to remain static. If a village member chose to leave, or, more frequently, been cast out, he or she would wander until coming upon another village, where the language used would differ from their own either slightly (they say 'oyster', we say 'erster'), or radically (ask a UK resident the difference between 'bum' and 'fanny' sometime -- you'll find that they're not really synonyms at all). This happened because there was no unifying text, available to all and sundry, declaring in no uncertain terms how words should be pronounced, and what they actually meant.
To this day, regional differences in both pronunciation and meaning exist -- sometimes radically even between counties only a few miles apart. Thus: parkway/driveway, farther/further, and such pseudologisms as 'irregardless'. It is a losing battle that I wage against the Incorrect, and a thankless one. Don't you be fooled; I may make merry, but I'm howling inside whenever I hear someone say "Have your cake and eat it too"; if you want to know the way the aphorism really goes, drop me a comment.
And finally, Erbo asks: Who put the "bop" in the "bop-sh-bop-sh-bop"? Who put the "ram" in the "ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong"?
In 1864, a crack unit of telegraph operators, operating under the guise of government officials, made contact with an alien race known as the Sh'fhr'hug'gnon through the use of a prototype telegraph device, known only as 'the Persuader'. Over the course of 3 years, an interstellar conversation progressed, during which time a mutually beneficial artificial language was developed to aid in comprehension between the newly-contacted aliens and humanity. Assessing the need for secrecy in this endeavor, it was determined that a mutation of the Morse Code would be the perfect implementation of this language.
However, the 'dits' and 'das' then in current usage were deemed to be unfit to carry the nuances of this fledgling language (known thereafter as 'Interspeke'), and thus a new vocabulary was born, replacing the 'dits' and 'das' with 'bomps', 'bops', 'dip da dips', and 'rams', among other innocent-sounding phonemes.
Unfortunately, due to the operators' imperfect understanding of the nuances of Sh'fhr'hug'gnon society, a devastatingly odious insult was delivered to the head of affairs on the other side of our galaxy, and it seemed that interstellar war was imminent. By this point, however, the governmental bodies of the World had been apprised of the situation, and a secret society had been constructed, with its only aim being the development and proliferation of weapons with which to destroy the incoming invaders.
After a pitched and heated battle lasting over 3 weeks, the Earth had finally claimed victory over the Sh'fhr'hug'gnon, and its technology was absorbed into the archives of human knowledge. Using this technology, the newly-constructed secret society (whose name is so secret that I cannot even set it down here) deployed an 'amnesia beam' to selectively erase the memories of worldwide humanity, leaving no trace of any of the events of the previous horrific period of history.
Some lingering racial memory, however, must have remained, for musician Barry Mann awoke from a troubled sleep one night to write "Who Put the Bomp?" And there you have it. Never let it be said that Akela neglects an earnest query. Keep ‘em coming!
Who dug the hole in the outhouse?
(You did, baby, you did)
Who put Whitey in the White House?
(You did, baby, you did, baby)
-- "Keep a Lid on Things", Crash Test Dummies
