[942] in Humor
Just what is ASCII?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Fri Jun 23 11:54:31 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 11:45:38 EDT
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 15:42:29 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
...
From: lee@sq.com (Liam Quin)
I was looking at my 1837 copy of Johnson's Dictionary, when I came across
the following entry:
ASCII n s. [from the greek] Those people who, at certain times
of the year, have no shadow at noon; such are the inhabitatants
of the torrid zone.
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[Lest you think this is a joke, a much more recent dictionary, my 1941
Funk & Wagnall's Standard Universal Dictionary of the English Language
(the first one I checked in) has:
as'cians [I can't reproduce the pronunciation very well with ascii,
but the c is soft, as in "ash'yanz"] n. pl. Shadowless men;
inhabitants of the torrid zone, who twice in the year cast no
shadow at noon. a'sci-i.
This puts "ascii" right up there with "email" as a current, high-tech word
with a nearly-forgotten, no-tech past... -psl]
