Photo: dragon dream [Flickr]
It takes a clever person to create good similes, but it takes a genius to create one as non-sensical as this one above! Well played, sir!
Update 7/22/10 - Groucho Marx! Thanks everybody!
Photo: dragon dream [Flickr]
It takes a clever person to create good similes, but it takes a genius to create one as non-sensical as this one above! Well played, sir!
Update 7/22/10 - Groucho Marx! Thanks everybody!
but you can't tuna fish.
Ha-cha-cha-cha.
Is quite boring in rhyme.
Please confine all puns,
To more interesting ones.
The phrase is based on the saying "time flies like an arrow", itself used as an example of syntactic ambiguity. The saying is often attributed to Groucho Marx, but according to The Yale Book of Quotations there is no reason to believe Groucho actually said this. [1] Instead, it traces the quote to a 1982 post on the Usenet group net.jokes. However, the juxtaposition of the phrases "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana" appears already in the 1960s as an example of the problems in having computers understand natural language. An early appearance in print, in slightly modified form, is from 1965:
"Time flies like an arrow" may seem fairly straightforward to us, but a machine sees a number of other possibiities, for example "Time the speed of flies as quickly as you can" ("time" being interpreted as a verb rather than a noun) and "Certain flies enjoy an arrow" ("time" being interpreted as an adjective, and "like" being interpreted as a verb). The machine could be instructed to rule out these particular offbeat parsings, but how would it handle the sentence, "Fruit flies like bananas"? [2]