Grammarian walks into a bar, tells the bartender, “I can write a correct sentence using the word had seven consecutive times.”
“No way,” the bartender says.
“Care to bet?”
“Sure. Drinks on me if you can.”
“Okay. X writes ‘had’, the simple past tense—‘I had a good time before that imbecile came’—when he should have written ‘had had’, the past perfect—‘I had had a good time…’ In noting X’s error, I use the past perfect and say, ‘If X, where he had had ‘had,’ had had ‘had had,’ he would have been correct.”
“I’ve been had. You win.”
A lovely story about a pedant!
This is how I would like to learn about grammar – everyday.
I resemble that remark!
My reply to Elisa–“I resemble that remark!”–should have appeared here. My bad.
This is both funny and thrilling. Easy win I must say. Good writing altogether.
Great… made me smile as this grammar is a headache for my students… kudos…
The village signwriter took a call asking him to replace the old sign at the Hare and Hounds pub and so he called round the next morning. As he approached the pub, an eighteenth century coachhouse, he looked at the sign and its newly painted hunting scene above the words “hare and hounds”. He had expected an old, faded or broken sign, not something that looked like it had been made just days ago, so he asked the landlord what was wrong with the sign. The landlord answered: “There is too much space between “hare and “and” and “and” and “hounds”.
Ken and Jim,
Both flash stories: two, too, to my way of thinking.
Reminds me of Galway Kinnel’s poem “The Prayer”.
I like it!
You should be had up for literary chicanery. 🙂
Many years ago my school pottery teacher (yes, there was such a being…) told me another version of this story. It went something along these lines:
Two students, Jack and Jill, wrote an exam. At one point in the stories they wrote, Jack had written “…he had a great time…”, while Jill had written “…he had had a great time…”
When their teacher received the examiners’ report, he found the following comment about what the students had written:
“Jill, where Jack had had “had”, had had “had had”. “Had had” had had the examiners’ approval.”
And that’s how you get a free drink! Well done.