🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <VA.00001120.00770559@office-futures.com>, 
rgw@office-futures.com [Roger] wrote:
>In article <20000611213326.18431.00000136@ng-fp1.aol.com>, 
>Iris Cohen wrote:
>> << how do you know that what you think is the grass in your lawn 
>> is not a grasslike weed.  >>
>> 
>> This is not really a funny joke
>
>It was only a half-joke, Iris, but our inarticulate young supplicant 
>seems resistant to anything that involves the use of brain cells.

This little exchange nicely illustrates one of the great problems
of a medium such as Usenet -- just what does the writer *really*
mean?  It's hard to say -- it all seems to depend on the reader! :-)
[Oh, and the other problem, notoriously applicable to Oz's "Kym",
is making assumptions about gender from ambiguous names; such as
my assumption here that "Lou", the original poster, is male.]

When I first read Roger's comment I took it at face value as I'm
quite aware of grass-like plants that are not grasses and which
may or may not be weeds in some places.  It seemed like a
reasonable question for clarification given that the original
poster was asking for advice but clearly wasn't of botanical bent
himself so may not have really known what it was he was seeing.

However, that original poster then appeared to take offence at 
what he perceived to be a "joke" at his expense.  (It turns out
from Roger's subsequent admission that he was half right and I
was half wrong. :-)

Iris then commented as above ("This is not really a funny joke")
which, again, *I* took to be a simple statement of fact on the
assumption that Iris had made the same interpretation of Roger's
earlier post as I had.

However, it now appears to me that Roger has misinterpreted Iris's
post as being a mite critical (i.e. he's perhaps assumed the emphasis
is on 'funny' as in "This is not really a *funny* joke") and has 
defended himself by saying it was only intended as a half-joke.

Okay folk -- that's how I saw it.  What did you all really *mean*?

Cheers,  Ian S.

ianstDELETE@THISdpi.qld.gov.au