jOn wrote:
|| "Dougal" <DougalAThiskennel.free-online.co.uk> wrote in message
|| news:
[email protected]...
||| Richard Brookman wrote:
|||
|||| This **** anon leet fle a fart,
|||| As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,
|||| That with the strook he was almoost yblent.
|||| and said....
|||
||| But it's even more annoying than any signature!
|| It's like Vogon poetry
This Nicolas let fly a fart
As loud as if it was a thunderclap
He was near blinded by the blast, poor chap...
At the risk of patronising anyone who knows about it, it's Chaucer, from The
Miller's Tale, and they are among the funniest lines written in English
before 1400, not that there is much competition.
Briefly, a scholar is bonking his landlord's young wife while the older man
is out of the scene (never mind where, too complicated). The wife's suitor,
a young cleric and a bit of a nancy-boy (think Fotherington-Thomas), appears
at the bedroom window early in the morning to try and get her to kiss him.
She agrees and sticks her "ers" out of the window as a joke, which he duly
kisses (in the dark). He vows revenge and returns a few minutes later with
a red-hot branding iron. He calls again, and this time the scholar decides
to put his "ers" out for a laugh. Just as the cleric is about to kiss it,
he farts loudly in his face. The cleric takes this as a target and hits him
right in the sensitive bit with the hot iron and the story ends in chaos and
confusion as everyone gets their just deserts.
When I was a teacher, I switched a lot of kids onto Chaucer (which has its
difficult bits) by reading the Miller's Tale in full (in modern translation)
before the boring stuff. It never failed to have them rolling in the
aisles, mainly because they didn't realise that people said "arse" and
"fart" in 13-eighty-something. The idea of a fart being as loud as a
thunderclap and capable of blinding anyone who came too close chimed in with
their teenage sensayuma too. And the story is very well told.
As I said, I put it there when I was "cheerful" on the old Merlot. I didn't
realise it would annoy folk, and it will not appear again.
--
Rich
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I don't approve of signatures, so I don't have one. But I might, one day.
