How to Win a Pullet Surprise

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia. <ericshackle*bigpond.com>



Eighteen years ago, Professor Jerrold H. Zar composed a brilliant poem called Candidate for a Pullet Surprise (say the title aloud, and you'll get the pun). Here's the first verse:


I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.


Since then, thousands of readers around the world have chuckled over the poem and emailed it to their friends. It may have been read more often than any of Shakespeare's poems, yet the author is virtually unknown.


The poem is a favourite on the internet. Scores of websites have copied the original words, or posted versions amended by various wits and halfwits. Some have retitled it as Owed to a Spell Checker or Spellbound. 


Many webmasters have added the words Author unknown, or Anon. One says Sauce unknown. It's a classic example of intellectual property being stolen on the Internet.
Here is the complete official version, published with the author's kind permission:


CANDIDATE FOR A PULLET SURPRISE
By Jerrold H. Zar
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when eye rime.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The checker pours o'er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.
Bee fore a veiling checker's
Hour spelling mite decline,
And if we're lacks oar have a laps,
We wood bee maid too wine.
Butt now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know fault's with in my cite,
Of nun eye am a wear.
Now spelling does knot phase me,
It does knot bring a tier.
My pay purrs awl due glad den
With wrapped word's fare as hear.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should bee proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw's are knot aloud.
Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear four pea seas,
And why eye brake in two averse
Buy righting want too pleas.
Title suggested by Pamela Brown.
Based on opening lines suggested by Mark Eckman.


By the author's count, 127 of the 225 words of the poem are incorrect
(although all words are correctly spelt).
Published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, Jan/Feb1994, page 13. Reprinted Vol. 45, No. 5/6, 2000, page 20.


Five years ago, Zar told us, "My poem continues to travel around the Internet, sometimes with attribution (and permission) and sometimes without.


"In addition, several authors have asked to include it in books they were preparing (on writing, editing, and the like)."


Zar's experience closely resembles that of another gifted comic poet, Gene Ziegler, the overlooked author of a "stolen" poem that's now best known as If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer. 


In a remarkable string of coincidences, both poems were written in 1994, both authors were professors at US universities, and both their names begin with Z.


Back in 1994, Professor Gene Ziegler, an educator at New York's Cornell University who later became Dean of the American Graduate School of Management, an online business school in Nashville Tennessee, wrote a long and witty poem containing these ludicrous lilting lines:


If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!


He says he composed it in an hour, after his four-year-old grandson and the boy's older brother had "significantly rearranged" the resources on his Macintosh.


"This poem has probably received more attention and circulation than anything I have ever written," he said.


"It was originally a gift to internet friends and was passed from person to person, and posted on newsgroups and web sites in several countries. It has since been published in NetGuide Magazine, March 95, and in the Seattle Times, August 13, 1995, and has generated more than 1000 fan messages and requests to post.


"Unfortunately, the internet being what it is, some scoundrel whose editing skills exceeded his or her ethical standards edited the poem, reduced it by half, removed my name, and recirculated it under the title If Dr. Seuss were a Technical Writer, attributed to the ever prolific 'Anonymous.'"


Dr. Zseuss, "the real Dr. Seuss impersonator" (Ziegler's alter ego) responded with "Hang the Information Highwayman!", a poetic appeal for respect for another's written words. It should be brought to the notice of all webmasters.


Writing programs and teachers' groups around the world often quote the two poems to teach internet publishing ethics.


Ziegler told us: "The original poem has been set to music twice, once by a rapper and in the second case made into a Gilbert & Sullivan-like opera by a music teacher in Bangkok, who had his students sing it at graduation.


"It's been made into a brass plaque and sold in a gift shop in Dallas, recited on an Australian talk show and for the closing moments of a Vancouver TV show, Data's Cafe."


A search of the internet shows that despite all that publicity, Ziegler has good reason to feel cranky and forgotten. When we googled his memorable phrase "socket packet pocket" we found about 231,000 references. We checked out some of the websites. In nearly every case, the original poem has been cut in half, and posted without the author's name.


Ziegler says on his webpage:


"When I first discovered what had happened to my original poem, I did a web search and found more than 200 copies of my poem posted, most of which were the edited and unattributed version.


"Over the years I have written to two score webmasters pointing them to the Clocktower site and asking them to remove the offending version. Most have been gracious and cooperative with my request.


"One woman scolded me for my claim and said that the true author was a close friend of hers and that I should be ashamed of myself for claiming her friend's work:-)


"I gave up trying to track down all of the forged postings because it was spreading faster than I could write, and have taken comfort in all of the fans who have seen and recognized my original work and who have taken the time to write to me and express their appreciation."

We found Zar's bio on the internet, and emailed him, seeking details of his original poem and asking if he was aware of this strange coincidence He replied:

Indeed, I have seen Gene Ziegler's poem more than once on the Internet!
I am aware that my poem has been distributed many, many times, via e-mail, at Web sites, and in printed newsletters and books, very often without attribution and in a badly altered form. As you note, my poem was published in 1994 (and republished "by popular demand" in 2000).
I recently retired from Northen Illinois University, where, after several years as a professor of biological sciences, I served for 18 years as Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Research and Dean of the Graduate School. In the latter position I presided over 53 graduation ceremonies for master's- and doctoral-degree students.
At these events I and the University president were expected to deliver some inspirational remarks to the graduates as they went forth with their advanced degrees to improve the world in a variety of fields.
I soon evolved my remarks into something out of the ordinary, such as poetry with both comical and serious elements and a quasi-serious discourse on lessons from "The Wizard of Oz" that are pertinent to such graduates.
Shortly after my retirement, the University reformatted the undergraduate-student and graduate-student graduation ceremonies in a fashion that excluded the Dean of the Graduate School from making formal remarks to the assemblage. (The purported reason for this change was, in part, accommodation of the audiences in the available campus venues; but I do wonder if it was to prevent any future dean from presenting the kinds of literary offerings that I produced.)
Needless to say: I have NOT read aloud the spelling-checker poem; it rather loses its impact if it is not experienced visually!

LINKS:

Dr. Jerrold H Zar: http://www.bios.niu.edu/zar/zar.shtml

Dr. Gene Ziegler:  http://www.guernsey.net/~poetry/genez.html

Counting Sheep Will Help You Sleep

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia.<ericshackle*bigpond.com>



For centuries people have lulled themselves to sleep by counting imaginary sheep. They may appear in a flock, or jumping through a hedge or fence.


You can count 1,2,3 and so on, but there are plenty of other ways to count them.
Close your eyes and count some sheep, and very soon you'll fall asleep, we were told as children. 


English-born Ian Scott-Parker, who now lives in Hurricane, Utah (US), can do that in one of the strangest languages we've ever heard.


"My father taught me to count yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dic almost as soon as I had learned to count in the more common one, two, three," he told us. 


"Bumfit for fifteen was a great childhood favorite."


Ian, a sophisticated man of the world with refined tastes and wide-ranging interests, grew up in Cumbria, near the Scottish border. These days few if any people still speak the ancient dialect.


"There are traditional methods of counting sheep in many of the Lakeland dales, though none seem to still be in actual use," says an article on a Cumbrian website, The Countryside Museum. 


"Garnett in 1910 said even then that the method was almost obsolete and as for the names of the numbers, but few of the farmers remember them. 'Yan' is still used for 'one', but the others are only known as curiosities.


"Traditionally the shepherd counts to twenty, then he marks a stone or stick with a 'score' and starts again. The final total is given as so many score of sheep. The method seems to be common to old Cymric or Celtic areas although the words themselves have taken slightly different forms over the years."


The website displays a list of numerals in three ancient dialects - Keswick (Cumbria), Wensleydale (West Yorkshire) and Welsh.


Most of the number words are similar in all three dialects, but others are quite different. Nine, for instance is dovera in Keswick, horna in Wensleydale, and naw (pronounced now) in Wales.


Not everyone agrees that counting sheep can cure insomnia. It's too boring, according to two Oxford scientists.


Fifty people who had trouble getting to sleep were divided into three groups, which were asked to (a) count sheep (b) imagine a placid scene, such as a beach or waterfall or (c) act normally. The sheep counters took 20 minutes longer than usual to drop off.


After we wrote a piece on this subject six years ago, David Halperin, from Urim, Israel,
told us in an email that we should read a book called Ounce Dice Trice by Alastair Reid.


"The book lists different ways of counting to ten," he said. "Reid writes, 'If you get tired of counting one, two, three, make up your own numbers, as shepherds used to do when they had to count sheep day in, day out. You can try using these sets of words instead of numbers, when you have to count to ten.'


"There are 57 pages of this delightful nonsense, with equally delightful illustrations. My wife and I love it."


David told us "I have been a member of Kibbutz Urim for the past 50 years, and so have had many -- and varied -- jobs over the decades: lathe operator, physics and mathematics teacher, factory worker, bookkeeper... But for the last few of them I was a musicologist at Tel-Aviv University until my retirement eight years ago."


In the book Ounce, Dice, Trice, now sadly out of print, Alastair Reid, a Scottish-born author, poet and translator, cites these witty ways of counting to 10:
Ounce, dice, trice, quartz, quince, sago, serpent, oxygen, nitrogen, denim.
Instant, distant, tryst, catalyst, quest, sycamore, sophomore, oculist, novelist, dentist.


Archery, butchery, treachery, taproom, tomb, sermon, cinnamon, apron, nunnery, density.


Acreage, brokerage, cribbage, carthage, cage, sink, sentiment, ointment, nutmeg, doom.


He also suggests ways of naming the fingers, such as Tommy Thumbkins, Ettie Wilkson, Long Lauder (a distant relative of today's Laura Norder?), Davy Gravy, and Little Quee. 


He suggests that times of day should include daypeep, dimity, dewfall and owlcry.
"And if someone tells you something you don't believe, look at him steadily and say FIRKYDOODLE, FUDGE, or QUOZ."


The Random Pseudodictionary defines Firkytoodle: (n) Foreplay. Not my original word, but a wonderful word to say. Try it. Firkytoodle. Probably got it from Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary. Example: As in a song lyric: Momma don't 'low no firkytoodlin' 'round here.


The Countryside Museum: http://www.fellpony.f9.co.uk/country/c_main.htm


Video, Counting Sheep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUjDvRJ_rzo

English: "The Trickiest Language You Ever Did See"

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia.<ericshackle*bigpond.com>



English spelling is guaranteed to confuse even those of us who have spoken the language all our lives. Sometimes, when we find our mother tongue difficult to understand, we say "it sounds like double Dutch."


A Dutch school teacher and author, Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), returned the compliment when he wrote a long poem, De Chaos, first published in Amsterdam as an appendix to the fourth edition of his schoolbook Drop Your Foreign Accent, engelsche uitspraakoefeningen (Haarlem: H D Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1920).


In an article entitled The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos, published by the Simplified Spelling Society in 1994, Chris Upward, of Birmingham, England, a vice-president of the Society, wrote: 


"A feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skillfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes."


Upward's scholarly review, and a complete version of The Chaos, are displayed on the English 
Spelling Society website. Here are the opening lines:


Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.


A poem frequently quoted on the Internet is The English Lesson. Strangely, no-one seems to know the name of the genius who composed it. Here it is:


The English Lesson
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot...would a pair be beet?
If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?
If the singular is this, and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese?
Then one may be that, and three be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
So our English, I think you will agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.
I take it you already know
of tough, and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
on hiccough, through, slough and though.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead!
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language: Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.


[An alternative version quotes the final couplet as:
And yet to write it, the more I sigh,
I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.]


The puzzle of English pronunciation is admirably described in this final couplet of the first stanza of The English Lesson:
So our English, I think you will agree
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.


Audio of the poem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxoWYDZg30&feature=related

English Spelling Society: http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php

Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally

From ERIC SHACKLE in Sydney, Australia<ericshackle*bigpond.com>



"Well, slap my ass and call me Sally!"   I laughed out loud when my internet friend Rocky Rodenbach, of Tampa, Florida, used it in an email. When I asked him about it, he said the phrase was commonplace in his neck of the woods, to express surprise.


An American blogger wrote: "It's a reference to newborns. The doctor/midwife/nurse/whoever's doing the delivery will give the baby a smack to encourage the lungs to start, and it's also around this time that the baby is named, hence the 'call me...' part. So the person using the expression would be saying that he or she was apparently naïve about something, as a newborn would be".


Dozens of similar expressions can be found on the internet. I particularly like 

"Paint me purple and call me stupid."

Here are some of the others:


Well, pour me out and call me buttermilk.
Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit.
Well, love me tender and call me Elvis
Well, shut my mouth and call me luggage
Well, paint my toenails and call me Mabel
Well, buy me slippers and call me Dorothy
Well, strip my gears and call me shiftless
Well, wet my feet and call me Ducky
Well, slap my forehead and call me stupid
Well, feed me nails and call me Rusty
Well, rub my belly and call me Buddha


British and Australian readers may have thought that the ass being slapped was a donkey, as they spell the slang word for butt (buttocks) as arse.


If the expression did in fact refer to a donkey, then it may well have been adapted from this English nursery rhyme or children's song:


Dancing Dolly had no sense,
She bought a fiddle for eighteen pence--
And the only tune that she could play
Was "Sally get out of the donkey's way."


Brits of a certain age will remember with pleasure, pop singer Gracie Fields belting out the song "Sally in Our Alley":


Sally, Sally,
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley


I was surprised to learn that Sally in Our Alley was born long before the 20th century. English composer and playwright Henry Carey (c. 1693-­1743) wrote the original tune and words, and the song was first published in 1726.


About that time, Sally Lunn, a young French baker, sought refuge in England. "She began to bake a rich round and generous bread now known as the Sally Lunn bun," said the Sally Lunn's Co. in the English town of Bath.


Maybe that too was the origin of this nursery rhyme::
Sally go round the moon,
Sally go round the sun.
Sally go round the chimneypots
On a Saturday afternoon.


Slap my ass and call me Sally! reminded me of a similar phrase I heard used by Australian and US troops serving in New Guinea during World War II: "Cut off my legs and call me Shorty!"  That was the name of a song Louis Armstrong recorded in 1940 which was often broadcast by the US Armed Forces radio stations.


Smack My Ass & Call Me Sally Bangin'  hot sauces are manufactured by Tijuana Hot Foods Inc., based not in Tijuana, Mexico, but in Florida, US.


"Chet was a bad dude, the kinda guy that would steal the wooden leg from a handicapped person," said the Insane Chicken website, in Pembroke, Massachusetts, "so it was no surprise when someone slipped some of this homemade hot sauce into Chet's moonshine. After one sip, big Chet fell to his knees and with a tear in his eye shouted, 'Well Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally!'"


VIDEOS:
Slap  My Ass Sauce Tasting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw3z1sTg5sg
Gracie Fields Sings Sally in Our Alley:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=K93nPStUfW0

                         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~