Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Clarification on question #1

I have received some grief over my wording of the first question:
White, milk or dark chocolate?
Some people missed the comma and perceived the question to mean a choice between "white milk" and dark chocolate? It was not meant to be a trick question but it appears to have caught more than one of the participants. I was instantly reminded of Eats, Shoots and Leaves - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.
The story goes that a panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires 2 shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"PANDA. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like it...where do you come up with these things!