On: Lewis Carroll – computing the day of the week for any given date (1887)

[aidenn0]

Like the joke of the guy returning to Boston after being away for years; asks his cab driver "Do you know where I can get scrod" and the driver says "Sure, but I've never heard that in the past perfect before!"

[xorbax → aidenn0]

This might be the first time I get a joke's punchline but not the setup

[aidenn0 → xorbax]

Scrod is the name for a small whitefish; he was looking for a seafood restaurant.

[halfcat → xorbax]

You can create infinite such jokes that end with:

…and the duck said to the bartender, “put it on my bill”

[8bitsrule → aidenn0]

Hmmm. When I heard that joke long ago, the driver said it was the pluperfect subjunctive. And here I took his word for it.

[aidenn0 → 8bitsrule]

Same thing. From Wikipedia: "The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English"

[8bitsrule → aidenn0]

Another especially funny part of that joke for me is that this is set in Boston (which has a couple of important colleges) ... because someone once told me that a lot of post-graduates of that college I was attending were driving taxicabs in that city.