Yesterday afternoon my ears pricked up when I heard the rush-hour radio announcer's deadpan remark, "The Outer Loop is jammed because of a vampire on the Beltway near Route 66."
Unusual for one of Them to be out and about in broad daylight, no? Then the rusty metalinguistic reprocessor kicked in and I belatedly parsed van fire as it should have been understood. Reminds me of a comrade's comment that one way to confuse a lip-reader is to say, out-of-context, "olive juice" — which to the eye looks like "I love you" ...
(see also SemioticArsenal (20 Nov 2003), ... )
TopicHumor - TopicLanguage - TopicPersonalHistory - 2004-03-20
(correlates: FreeTrial, HowManyLeft, ThornEd, ...)