One of those days you wake up and your best friend forwarded you those laugh-out-loud email; if you haven’t heard of this one you must… I’m cross-posting this to my company’s internal blog (it’s too funny for anyone to miss!)
A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike
English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.
‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.”Pencil,’ however, is
masculine: ‘el lapiz.’
A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups,
male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’
should be a masculine or a feminine noun.
Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the
feminine gender (‘la computadora’), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic; 2. The native
language they use to communicate with other computersis incomprehensible to
everyone else; 3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory
for possible later retrieval; and 4. As soon as you make a commitment to
one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
(THIS GETS BETTER!)
The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine
(‘el computador’), because: 1. In order to do anything with them, you have
to turn them on; 2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for
themselves; 3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the
time they ARE the problem; and 4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize
that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better
model.
The women won. Send this to all the smart women you know…and all the men
that have a sense of humor.
Cathy notes: So really, in Spanish, what sex is a computer? Or an iPhone? Or a CPU chip? Dude, Chinese doesn’t seem to hard when it comes to computing…
