[tpm] A tad too subtle for me

[Tom Legrady]

If you hover your cursor on the image, the tooltip says, "[audience looks
around] 'What just happened? There must be some context we're missing.'"

But it does seem to be stretching things, humour value is limited.

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Indy Singh <indy at indigostar.com> wrote:

>   Close. I just googled it:
>
> Source:
> http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Formal_Languages
>
> Megan <http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Megan> is standing
> at the podium of the 10th Annual Symposium on Formal Languages (as per the
> banner behind her). Cueball<http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cueball>crashes in through a glass pane and shouts "GRAMMAR!" and dashes off.
> Megan <http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Megan> remains at
> the podium looking perplexed.
>
> This is a reference to the phrase context-free grammar<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar>,
> which is a technical term used in formal language<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/formal_languages>theory. The play on words is that
> Cueball <http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cueball> does
> not provide any context for his statement.
>
> Indy Singh
> IndigoSTAR Software -- www.indigostar.com
>
>  *From:* J. Bobby Lopez <jbl at jbldata.com>
> *Sent:* Saturday, August 04, 2012 5:52 PM
> *To:* Fulko Hew <fulko.hew at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* Unix Unanimous <u-u at mail.unixunanimous.org> ; Toronto PerlMongers<tpm at to.pm.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [tpm] A tad too subtle for me
>
> I have a feeling it has something to do with context-sensitive grammer
> (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-sensitive_grammar) and formal
> languages, and possibly that we (the audience) are the context.
>
> That's my best guess.
>
> -Bobby
>
> On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Fulko Hew <fulko.hew at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>  On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 4:15 PM, <arocker at vex.net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Did anybody get the joke in Friday's http://xkcd.com/1090/ xkcd?
>>>
>>
>> Not sure, but a mouseover revealed the following hidden caption/titlte...
>> Does it help you? because it didn't help me.
>>
>>
>> [audience looks around]  'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'
>>
>>
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>>
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