The Spanish Computer
 

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 computers is 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

You only have to punch something into the computer once...

Everything I put into the computer gets spit back out.

That's because you're using a 3 1/2" floppy...

I was thinking CD's, but they are only 5-1/4".:D

LOL!

Yeah, but they're only 1/16" thick; ask any woman - girth is more important than length...

Some of us have a hard drive. Many of us have a SCSI HARD DRIVE... :)

I have enough RAM & CPU that I can get by with a smaller drive.

SCSI?? Aka "skuzzy"? Or did you buy into the Apple campaign to pronounce it "sexy"?

In fact we do use both terms masculine and feminine.

I was having and interesting discussion with an English friend who didn't understand why we have genders for things and what is a reasoning behind this. For example a drinking glass is masculine (el vaso) and a cup is feminine (la copa).

Then he asked that if a glass and a cup get together, do they produce shot glasses?

Quote:

I have enough RAM & CPU that I can get by with a smaller drive.

I have 2 CPUs and 2 SCSI harddrivers. Guess I'm lucky?

Or like my boss says, "Don't worry about it, it's a genetic thing you can't help it".

An interesting question I've often wondered about is, how does the gender of new nouns get decided?

For example, the word 'bong' is a fairly new word in the language.

In German, I believe it's 'blueber' (no umlaut in my char set, first e should be omitted, and u should have umlaut).

Who decides whether it's 'die blueber', 'der blueber', or 'das blueber'?

ianc

Well, big boy... I only have 1.5 megs of RAM and a 3000 CPU in my system, so together with my SCSI I can both "ram it home after scsi'ing it several times"... :)

Course after all this discussion am very happy that I have an oversized cooling fan!

ordinary scsi is soooo 1999
got 6 hot plug disks on a Perc3 raid controller and 4 gig worth of memory

my vmwares run like a rabbit on an amphetamine diet...

Ianc,
der/the/ bong
die /the / bongs 1 or more
das / loch im im bong ist verstoppt= the hole in the bong is clogged
who decides ? I just know what sounds right.
Rika

the teacher was a woman