Monday, October 20, 2008

Funniest Sentence of the Day

From Simon Winchester, who's written a book on the Oxford English Dictionary (among many others), writing in the NYTimes about the change in meaning of "subprime":
The current print edition of the O.E.D., for example, still sports this definition of the unusual word “abbreviator”: “a junior official of the Vatican, whose duties include drawing up the pope’s briefs” — which would clearly, after briefs-as-legal-documents transmuted into briefs-as-boxer-alternatives, benefit from some rewriting.

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