That’s what I assumed it was. What’s the real answer?
.
As mentioned above, Art Teacher. Small words (or better yet, doodles) please.
Anybody got a geeky joke? Sorry to hijack 
NH4 is ammonium.
So, pandemonium.
It’s based on the concept of distinctive features and how to transcribe sound change laws.
In short, [+X] indicates that a sound has feature “X” and [-X] that it lacks it. For example, [p] and [b] are both [+biliabial] and [+plosive] but the former is [-voice] and the latter is [+voice]. Furthermore, –> means “becomes” and / ___ “in the environment of”
When applied to the above line it reads : "a unit lacking the feature Roman acquires the feature Roman when it is surrounded by two units having the Rome feature.
In other words, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”
That was my first thought. Though after reading the whole explanation, I’m still don’t understand it.
Well, the extrapolation from “phonology” to “proverb” is not perfect but perhaps my explanation isn’t as clear as I thought. Let’s try again :
[-Roman] not Roman
–> becomes
[+Roman] Roman
/ [+Rome] ___ [+Rome] when it is in the “Rome” environment
Thank you for both explanations. A pretty good joke really. I simply had no clue about the notation and was more focused on trying to suss that out versus starting from the better clues of “Rome” and “Romans” and trying to free-associate that into the proverb. Which was dumb of me.
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?
To get to the same side.
Little Johnny took a drink
And then he was no more
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4
99 little bugs in the code.
99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around.
101 little bugs in the code.
AB in English Literature, and I work in retail customer service. But I’ve read enough popular science to get about 70% of the jokes in the thread so far. I’ve actually told the Mandelbrot joke on my company’s internal channel, twice; nobody’s gotten it.
I’ve told the Mandelbrot joke in our siblings WhatsApp group. Both my math major siblings did not get it, while the middle school science teacher did. Admittedly college was at least 30 years ago for all of us.
My background is Finance and Statistics, I think I got all the jokes here except the linguistics notation one.
BA in “Liberal Studies.” Been teaching high school in California for 36 years. Credentialed to teach Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and English.
I’ve been getting the jokes about 75% of the time. Maybe not the depth of the joke, but I can at least see where the humor is coming from. The ones that sail over my head usually involve serious math or linguistics. I thought the IPA joke was hilarious but impossible to share over an IPA.
The truth is out there.
Anybody got the URL?
The Internet: where men are men, women are men,
and children are FBI agents.
Some things Man was never meant to know.
For everything else, there’s Google.
HEY! I resemble this ditty!
I used to work with someone who’s license plate was ALEPH 0. Can you guess the make and model of the car?
Make is easy:
spoiler so others can play
Infiniti
Model is a stumper, at least for me.
A couple years ago I saw a car whose personalized plate said “NOT INNI”
Q45. It was their first model (i.e. aleph null - the “first” infinity)
Yo Mama’s so fat, they have to let out a notch in the Van Allen belt
Yo Mama’s so fat, it takes 2 Borg Cubes to assimilate her.
Years ago, I was reading a column on Slate that mentioned a neurological disease that caused people to laugh uncontrollably, and asked what the title would be when Oliver Sacks wrote a book about it. I commented that that it would be “The Man Who Mistook His Wife. Please.”