11.15.2007

Peeve.

"Your welcome."

What about my welcome? Are you passively/aggressively communicating that I have left it behind and should seek to retrieve it as it is becoming something of an annoyance, like an email from a roommate saying simply, "Your shoes." ? [Yeah, I have no idea to punctuate that correctly.]

Want more? Read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynne Truss.


In other news: "Peeve" means a vexation or grievance. The term is nearly 100 years old (relatively recent) and comes from a back-formation of the term "peevish," which is to be ornery.

1 comment:

Flipper said...

I'm thoroughly amused by the title of this book. It's supposedly the punchline of a joke about a panda who walks into a diner.

However, I first heard it long before the book came out, as the punchline of a slightly different joke. In that version, the panda visits a prostitute, and refuses to pay. The madam pulls out a dictionary and shows him: A prostitute "performs sexual acts in return for payment." He turns to the dictionary entry for Panda, and the same punchline takes on an entirely different meaning.

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