A sequence in which an American translator mangles an Arab speaker's words is funny, if heavy-handed.
My father and his siblings thought that rude words were funny.
My sentences in these notes are coherent, sometimes even lyrical, and the words are funny, direct, revealing.
"Fuckety-bye", "lubricated horse's cock" and "faff-arse", which isn't even rude, but it's satisfying for the same reason all compound swear-words are funny: when done well, they restore meaning where it is starting to fray.
As ever ahead of his time, Crisp had realised that most publishing was about personality, not words on pages (though his words were funny and profound), so the publication gave him access to audiences, starting with a Late Night Line-Up show.
Not only did they confirm that weird non-words tend to make us laugh, they discovered something more profound: "Non-words are funny to the extent that they are weird," says Westbury.
To be fair, Chinese is not an easy language to learn, let alone translate, but you have to admit the Google Translate service's desperate attempts to extract meaning out of the (now former) Google executive's words are funny as hell.
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