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Language Log
More probably
This post is following up on "Probably", 8/11/2024, which sketched the spectrum of probably pronunciations, from the full version with three clear phonetic syllables and two full /b/ stops between the first and second syllables, to a fully-lenited version with just one phonetic syllable and no residue of the intervocalic consonants:
Your browser does not support the audio element. Your browser does not support the audio element.
But as that post noted, there are many variants in between, and this post will exhibit a few of them.
Here's one with the two intervocalic onsets still there, but lenited to the status of approximants rather than stops:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Probably3X1.png
(From Morning Edition in 2009…)
And here's one where the first /b/ is totally gone, but the /bl/ is rendered with a full stop gap:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Probably4X1.png
Zeroing in on "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And just the "proba-" part, illustrating the loss of the first closure, and sounding in isolation more like "pow":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(That general pattern — rendered as something like "probly" in eye dialect — is by far the most common one, at least in my little random sample of 100. This example was from All Things Considered in 2010.)
Here's another monosyllabic version, from President Barack Obama in in 2010:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Zeroing in:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Probably5X1a.png
Here's one, from All Things Considered in 2007, where the first intervocalic stop becomes an approximate, and the /bl/ is reduced to just a weak /l/ — "probally" in eye dialect:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And zeroing in on "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Probably8X1.png
And finally, here's an example (from Weekend Edition in 2013) of the case rendered in eye-dialect as "prolly" — which was actually rather rare in my sample:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
A bit closer:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Probably10X1.png
And just the word "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
There are plenty of other variants Out There — reinforcing the point, made many times in these posts, that most aspects of allophonic variation are not symbolically mediated.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: encyclopedic
This word has appeared in 72 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
put out (1)
to stop something from burning
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Word of the Day
labyrinthine
Definition: (adjective) Resembling a labyrinth in form or complexity.
Synonyms: mazy.
Usage: A labyrinthine maze of sculpted bushes surrounded the estate.
Discuss
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Language Log
Prefixes and suffixes for common Japanese dishes
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/decoding.jpg
From Bored Panda (8/5/24). For people who love food and the culinary arts, this issue of Bored Panda, which has fifty parts, is almost like a bible.
Alas, no shime (see first item under "Selected readings" below, though nabe is mentioned in that post).
Selected readings
* "Phoshime" (8/7/24)
* "Chinese and Japanese Terms for Food Textures" (8/10/23)
* "Zo sashimi" (8/10/19)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024 Olympic Finals
Читать полностью…
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fib
a small, harmless lie (n.) | to tell a small, harmless lie (v.)
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Idiom of the Day
the last thing (one) wants
Something which one absolutely does not want or has no use for. Watch the video
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Language Log
Tocharian in South Asian languages?
In a comment to this post, "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24), Gokul Madhavan raised an interesting question:
I’m very curious to know if there are any reliable and up-to-date sources for Tocharian loanwords into Sanskrit or other Indo-Aryan languages.
Given both the use of Gāndhārī Prakrit across the region and the presence of the Kuṣāṇa empire in India, I would expect to find at least some Tocharian-origin names or words that got absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages.
I agree with Gokul that this is an interesting question, and it seems likely that there ought to be traces of Tocharian in South Asia. Aside from the Kuṣāṇa (c.30-c. 375 AD) vectors in India mentioned by Gokul, even afterward there was considerable coming and going between India and Tocharia during the heyday of the latter (2nd-7th cc.). For example, the famous Indian monk-translator, Kumārajīva कुमारजीव (344-413 AD; Jiūmóluóshí 鳩摩羅什), was married to a princess of Kucha, when the latter was the center of Tocharian B speakers. Consequently, for all such reasons, there is likely to be a significant number of Tocharian names and terms in Indo-Aryan languages, but I do not know of a systematic study or collection of such words. Perhaps this post will elicit helpful references from Language Log readers.
Selected readings
* "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24)
* "Rethinking the Yuezhi?" (8/5/24)
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — with very long, classified bibliography
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sack (1)
to fire someone from a job, to dismiss
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Idiom of the Day
(one's) final resting place
The location where one's body is interred after death. Watch the video
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model or account for people change from, say, 20 – from 10 to 20 years or beyond?
The full "probably" phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1.png And zeroing in on the pronunciation of "probably", which shows the type of reduction described in the Bluesky link:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1X1.png The speaker there is Jonathon Phillips, electrical engineer, program manager, Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington, DC. This is not a speech error — he's an articulate native speaker of American English, speaking in a fairly formal style, though rapidly.
In my modest 100-phrase "probably" sample, there were many other lenition patterns. Sometimes one or both of the /b/s lost their stop closure and turned into the kind of voiced approximant that phoneticians sometimes call "frictionless fricatives". Sometimes one of them was lenited unto apparently deletion while the other one remained stop-like, with results the might be spelled "probly" or "probby". This sample did not validate the claim that the full lenition-to-one-phonetic-syllable is "near universal", and the result is not the generally the same as the pronunciation of the word "pry", though the patterns probably overlap. But "pry"-like pronunciations of "probably" certainly happen.
I don't have time this morning to survey the full range of "probably" variants and to estimate their relative frequency in the NPR sample — or to look at samples from less formal sources. Those are tasks for another time, maybe — though because the variant performances of "probably" reflect gradient articulatory and acoustic changes, it's not easy to assign them to qualitatively distinct categories, or even decide exactly what to measure. If I were forced to define a set of "probably"-pronunciation categories, there would need to be a dozen or so of them. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of these patterns of variation, and the factors that correlate with them, would be a good phonetics-course term project!
Some earlier posts on the issue of phonetic lenition in English:
"Weak t", 4/17/2017
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018
"Farther on beyond the IPA", 1/18/2020
"First novels", 3/13/2022
"Pronunciation evolution", 4/15/2022
"More post-IPA astronauts", 4/16/2022
"Political flapping and voicing", 5/29/2022
"Ron's Princibles", 8/22/2023
"'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024
"Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction", 7/26/2024
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ill
good, excellent
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Idiom of the Day
be (one's) last resort
To be the only remaining thing or person that may help one or be of any use after all other options have been exhausted. Watch the video
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Language Log
A new Trump speaking style?
Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.
At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.
Here's a short sample from the 8/8/2024 press conference:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Most dangerous period of time I've ever seen for our country.
With that being said uh
we have somebody that
hasn't received one vote for
president and she's running
and that's fine with me.
But we were given
Joe Biden
and now we're given
somebody else
and I think frankly I'd rather be running against the somebody else.
But that was their choice, they decided to do that because uh
Kamala's record is horrible.
She's a radical left
person at a level that nobody's seen.
She picked a radical left
uh
man
that is uh-
he's got things done that he's-
he has positions that are just not- it's not even possible to believe
that they exist.
uh
he's going for things that
that nobody's ever
even heard of.
Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds
having to do with safety
he doesn't want to have
borders he doesn't want to have walls he doesn't want to have any form of safety for our country.
He doesn't mind people coming in from prisons and
neither does she, I guess, because she's not-
she couldn't care less she's the border czar.
By the way, she was the border czar
a hundred percent
and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she's not the border czar any more,
like nobody ever said it.
And I just hope that the uh
media becomes
more diligent, more honest,
frankly, because if they're not going to be honest it's going to be much tougher to bring our
country back.
We have a very very sick country right now.
From "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024:
[O]ver the past 8 years, many LLOG posts have analyzed several aspects of his rhetorical style, both the text and the delivery, which are strikingly different from other contemporary American politicians and public figures. Specifically, these posts have described his
* Repetition
* Informality
* Fluency
* Melody
This has nothing to do with the political and cultural orientation of his speeches — the same techniques could in principle be applied to the promotion of internationalism rather than nationalism, for example. No doubt the content is a large part of the reason for his appeal, but the rhetorical affinity with professional wrestling is probably the rest of it, as discussed in "The art of the promo", 10/31/2020.
The recent recordings certainly continue to be repetitive, but they seem less fluent to me.
A strange side note — YouTube's automated transcription for the 8/8/2024 press conference renders "border czar" as "Bazar":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Bazar.png
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Language Log
A medieval Chinese cousin of Eastern European cherry pierogi?
As a starting point for pierogi, here's a basic definition:
Pierogi, one or more dumplings of Polish origin, made of unleavened dough filled with meat, vegetables, or fruit and boiled or fried or both. In Polish pierogi is the plural form of pieróg (“dumpling”), but in English the word pierogi is usually treated as either singular or plural.
(Britannica)
Now, turning to Asia, we are familiar with the Tang period scholar, poet, and official, Duàn Chéngshì 段成式 (d. 863), as the compiler of Yǒuyáng zázǔ 酉陽雜俎 (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang), a bountiful miscellany of tales and legends from China and abroad. Yǒuyáng zázǔ is especially famous for including the first published version of the Cinderella story in the world, but it also contains many other stories and themes derived from foreign sources.
Knowing of my interest in such matters, Zihan Guo called my attention to a terse mention of a culinary item called "yīngtáo bìluó 櫻桃饆饠" ("cherry [?something?]") in Yǒuyáng zázǔ. One look and I was hooked. "Yīngtáo 櫻桃" doesn't present any major problem of its own; that's just the usual word for "cherry" in Sinitic, though, if I had all the time in the world, I would do an etymological and botanical study on its origins. As for bìluó 饆饠, I could tell from the extreme rarity of the characters and the word, plus the fact that it is disyllabic, that it almost certainly had a foreign origin. That suspicion is reinforced by the additional fact that it has a variant orthography, viz., bìluó 畢羅. The Middle Sinitic reconstruction of both written forms is pjit la.
I'm not the only person who suspected that bìluó 饆饠 / 畢羅 had a foreign derivation. Since it bore a superficial resemblance to "pilau", i.e., "pilaf", many scholars jumped at this equation, to the extent it has become more or less a commonly accepted etymology (as in Wiktionary and zdic) that the Sinitic word comes from Persian پلاو (pelâv). But there are three (actually more) strikes against such an assumption. First, and most obvious, the Middle Sinitic reconstruction doesn't work as well as the Modern Standard Mandarin. Second, neither of the variant orthographies of bìluó 饆饠 / 畢羅 use the "rice" radical mǐ 米 (Kangxi 119). Instead, the first variant just uses the general "eat" radical shí 食 (Kangxi 184) on both characters. Third, although cherry pilaf is possible as a dish, cherries are not one of the usual ingredients for pilaf, and it's not likely in any case that it would be so important an ingredient that a pilaf dish would be named after it. Fourth, other, more detailed, Tang recipes for bìluó 饆饠 / 畢羅 indicate (so Zihan tells me) that it is made of baked wheat dough and has meat filling.
With "pjit la" in the back of our mind (more about that later), we have to look elsewhere.
The first thing I thought of was "pi[e]rogi". It is made of wheat and has a filling (can be either meat or fruit). Pierogies are usually boiled, less often pan fried, but they can also be baked. Moreover, the sound of pjit la is vaguely similar to that of pierogi. Now we have to dig deep into the history and nature of pierogi.
As a matter of fact, when we were examining the background of that delicious Nebraska nosh, runza, we looked into pierogi a bit.
A runza (also called a bierock, krautburger, or kraut pirok) is a yeast dough bread pocket with a filling consisting of beef, cabbage or sauerkraut, onions, and seasonings. Runzas can be baked into various shapes such as a half-moon, a rectangle, a round (bun), a square, or a triangle.
The runza sandwich originated from the pirog, an Eastern European baked good or more specifically from its small version, known as pirozhok ([...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
guts
courage
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Idiom of the Day
latchkey kid
A child who is home alone after school or in general because their parents or guardians are at work. Watch the video
➖ Sent by @TheFeedReaderBot ➖
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Language Log
Theme — border Russian: variations — cats
A random cat video that showed up on Facebook:
Victor Steinbok, who called this post to my attention, notes:
I immediately noticed an oddity in the Russian signage before even noticing the Chinese. On the right side, the white lettering on top of the building reads "Groceries" (lit. "Products"). The green sign on the left is more unusual. It reads, "Fruit (plural) store beverage (singular) beer//tea candy vodka", followed by Chinese characters. Most of the Chinese signage is under the marquee.
The word that looks really odd is "beverage". Normally, Russian signage would have it in plural (напитки). I'm guessing this must be somewhere in the Russian Far East or possibly anywhere east of Irkutsk (it's a long Chinese border). Alternatively, there's some Chinese presence in Kazakhstan, but then the signage would likely be trilingual.
I think that Victor Steinbok is right when he first says "somewhere in the Russian Far East". On a yellow vertical Chinese sign with blue lettering that appears for a fleeting instant at the extreme left I see the name of the city of Suifenhe, which lies about 100 miles to the NNW of Vladivostok:
Suifenhe (Chinese: 绥芬河) is a county-level city in southeastern Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China, located where the former Chinese Eastern Railway crosses the border with Russia's town of Pogranichny, Primorsky Krai. In January 2014, Suifenhe became the only Chinese city in which trading with Russian Ruble is officially allowed. The city shares its name with the Suifen River, and is under the administration of Mudanjiang Prefecture-level City.
(Wikipedia)
Five Chinese characters at the bottom left of the green overhanging panel above the metal door read:
Lìyà shípǐn tīng 莉娅食品厅 ("Leah Food Hall")
That sounds like a typical name for that part of Heilongjiang province.
Other Chinese characters that are visible on the store indicate that it sells tobacco and offers postal services.
As for the cats, the two gray pusses are lucky to be protected by the windshield from the big guy outside on the hood. To the right, there are five other cat videos. I would not encourage you to watch the fifth, and especially not the sixth, which is needlessly vicious and cruel.
Selected readings
* "A Northeastern topolectal morpheme without a corresponding character" (6/9/20)
* "Another Northeastern topolectal term without specified characters to write it" (7/22/20)
* "Russian Loans in Northeast and Northwest Mandarin: The Power of Script to Influence Pronunciation" (1/23/11)
* "Manchu loans in northeast Mandarin" (10/7/13)
* "Northeastern Mandarin"
* "Cat phonetics" (3/13/16)
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Language Log
The Sinitic Word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin, part 2
[This is a guest post by Liam Kelley.]
Looking up "triệu" in this Nom dictionary brings up an example from a line in a work that appears to date from the early twentieth century that states: "The soul of the 4,000-year-old country has yet to awaken. The 25 million [triệu兆 ] people are still deep in slumber."
There was definitely modern Mandarin terminology that entered classical Chinese in Vietnam at that time (I haven't looked at many Nom texts from that period so I can't say about Mandarin terms in the spoken language, but it would make sense that some would be there too), and the topic here (soul of a country/nation, awakening from sleep) is the type of new nationalist concepts that spread from Japan/China to Vietnam at that time.
So, I don't know where exactly triệu comes from, but between what the author of this post wrote and this tidbit of information here, I would bet my money on it being a term that was in circulation in Mandarin/Southeast Asian circles in the nineteenth century.
Selected readings
* "The Sinitic Word for 'million' in Southeast Asian Mandarin" (8/10/24)
* "Unspecified large number" (8/7/09)
* "The cognitive technology of number" (7/11/08)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: centennial
This word has appeared in 125 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knock over (1)
to hit somebody with a vehicle and injure or kill them
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Word of the Day
brow
Definition: (noun) The projecting upper edge of a steep place.
Synonyms: top, summit, peak, edge, tip, crown, verge, brink, rim, crest, brim.
Usage: The sun set behind the brow of the distant hills.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: luminescent
This word has appeared in 13 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go over (1)
to look carefully at something like a report, essay, document, etc. to check for mistakes or to make improvements
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Word of the Day
unabashed
Definition: (adjective) Not disconcerted or embarrassed; poised
Synonyms: unembarrassed.
Usage: And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to laugh…and remain unabashed.
Discuss
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Language Log
Probably
From Technology Connections on Bluesky:
My favorite weird language thing is the near universal shortening of "probably" to "pry" in speech.
And people don't notice they're doing it! If I write "yeah that's pry not gonna work" that doesn't parse right, but if you say it out loud it absolutely does.
— Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social) Aug 10, 2024 at 2:52 PM
As a first pass at checking this, I took 100 instances at random from the 39,731 occurrences of "probably" in the NPR podcast corpus that I've referenced before (3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours).
What did I find?
The (dictionary pronunciation of the) word "probably" /ˈpɹɒbəbli/ has two intervocalic onsets, /b/ and /bl/, that are not followed by tautosyllabic stresssed vowels. They are therefore are candidates for the general process of intervocalic non-pre-stress lenition that's typical of American English, the best-known version of which is the flapping and voicing of coronal stops.
This articulatory and acoustic weakening happens to various degrees in the /b/ and /bl/ of "probably", including to the point of apparent deletion.
Let's start with an example that happens to have no lenition, from "Online Calculator Estimates Breast Cancer Risk", Morning Edition 4/19/2007:
Professor KARLA KERLIKOWSKE (Medicine, University of California San Francisco): When you do these models, you want something that's relatively simple and easy to measure.
AUBREY: And lifestyle isn't. No one can remember precisely what they eat or drink. But there are ways Kerlikowske would like to revive the Gail model. She would toss out the question asking women how old they were when their first baby was born. Not because other factors such as breast-feeding confound it, but because research suggests it is not as important as breast density.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We've appreciated the significance of breast density for probably 30 years.
AUBREY: The trouble is, there's never been an automated way to measure in a mammogram, the volume of epithelial cells and surrounding tissue that are typically involved in breast cancer.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We think if we had a quantitative measure of breast density that might add to the specificity of the model and really improve prediction for the individual woman.
Here's the full phrase containing un-lenited "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0.png And here we zero in on the word "probably" itself:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0X1.png As you can see, each of the two /b/ performances has a well-defined silent stop gap, followed by a clear release burst.
At the other end of the lenition continuum, here's an example where both onsets are lenited unto apparent deletion, from "Machines Slowly Mastering Art of Recognizing Faces", Talk of the Nation 1/22/2022:
CATHY (Caller): Well, hi, Ira. I love your show and you have a very interesting subject today as usual. My question for your guests is about the ability of the facial recognition technology to recognize faces as they change over the years, say a photo of an infant versus a teenager, adult or a senior.
FLATOW: Hmm. Jonathan, any comment on that?
Dr. PHILLIPS: So theres probably – there again, this is a very active research. But there's probably two different areas of aging with face recognition. The first, for example, is going from an infant as somebody grows through adulthood, because there are fixed ways of changing and there is substantial change. The other is for an adult from the age, say, from age 20 as they grow older in life.
And face recognition seems to be relatively stable up to about five years. But the challenge is then how do you [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pass on
If you pass something on, you give it to another person after receiving it yourself.
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Word of the Day
audacity
Definition: (noun) Fearless daring; intrepidity.
Synonyms: temerity.
Usage: Skill, coolness, audacity, and cunning he possessed in a superior degree, and it must be a cunning whale to escape the stroke of his harpoon.
Discuss
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Language Log
Primate preferences
Today's SMBC:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillas.png
Mouseover title: "Unprompted, they will walk into a cafe and pretend they have important business to do."
The aftercomic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillasAfter.png
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