Cowboy Joe

List member Greg M. sent me a follow up link to go with my Ten Commandments post last Thursday.

It's a bit from Fast Company magazine about what the Ten Commandments would look like in cell phone text.

Now, when you only have 160 characters to spend in a message - including spaces - you tend to get *very* creative and shorthanded with the language. For instance, "See you later" becomes "C U l8r."

Those of you familiar with text and instant messaging shorthand will enjoy it. Those of you who aren't so familiar with that brand of "English" will enjoy trying to decipher the Commandments.

As always, the medium may change, but the message remains the same.

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Cowboy Joe visited his first big city church yesterday and last night he was telling his pardners all about it.

"When I got there they had me park my ol' truck in the big corral."

"You mean the parking lot," interrupted Charlie, a fellow cowhand who'd been to the big city a bunch.

"Yup, I reckon," Joe replied, "and then I walked up the trail to the barn."

"The sidewalk to the front door," interprets Charlie.

"Inside the barn, I was met by this dude in his Sunday best."

"That would be the usher," chips in Charlie.

"Well," Joe says with an eye on Charlie, "that there 'usher' led me down the chute..."

"The aisle."

"Then he dropped me off at a cushy stall and told me to sit there," Joe says.

"Pew."

"Yup," replies Cowboy Joe. "That's what the purty lady sittin' next to me in that stall said, too."

[Doc's Daily Chuckle]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: Commandment Number Nine (which I remembered was number nine from the hand signals I learned last week), is "Thou Shalt Not Prevaricate." Which is a fancy Latin word that means to lie about something. Its roots are the word "varus," which means bent and became the word "varicus" which meant to straddle something or walk crookedly (bently), and the word "prae," which means "before" (you can see where the English word "pre" comes from). Together they were "praevaricari," which meant to pass before something, or to straddle something. In modern usage, if you prevaricate, you have "passed before or over the truth." And violated the Ninth Commandment.

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