Bradworthy News - February 2001

A Sexist joke

Recently a language instructor was explaining to her class that in French, nouns are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. One student asked the sex of a computer. As the word wasn’t in her French disctionary, for fun she decided to split the class into two groups by gender and asked them to decide whether “computer” should be a masculine or feminine noun.

The men decided that computers should definitely be of the feminine gender (“la computer”) because:

• No one but their creator understands their internal logic
• The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
• Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for possible later retrieval
• As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your pay cheque on accessories for it

The women, however, concluded that computers should be masculine (“le computer”) because:

• In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on
• They have a lot of data, but they are still clueless
• They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem
• As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you’d waited a little, you could have got a better model.

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