h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I know what an eohippus is, it's a "dawn horse", a tiny dog-sized creature which is the ancestor of our present horse.

A quick google for "chod" gives the following enlightening information:

"Sutra contains both hinayana and mahayana and each vehicle contains a system of view, meditation and action. Chod is a mahayana practice and from the sutra point of view, Chod is an expression of the philosophical view of the Prajnaparamita Sutra or on Transcendental Wisdom. This sutra is a discourse on the wisdom of the two types of identitylessness: identitylessness of self and identitylessness of meanings or appearances."

But I assumed it just meant poop.

-And no one even questioned Christopher as to what exactly an 'eohippus chod' might be. What a bunch of Jackanaples-

I, for one , never ask any Brit what the hell he's talking about. They claim that they speak English, I guess they do, sort of, there's enough English words in it. We just take on faith that the other ones might have some meaning.

Well, the google explanation was so much mystical shite that I guess that poop was the right call.

Mystical old horseshite, surely?

Daddy, Daddy - can I have a pet eohippus...?

Yo, hip, us

I first heard the word 'chod' from a Gloucester friend. It seemed to be one of his local words and he used it to mean something like a wally, berk or plonker.

Ed: >Tw*t I may be - but I apologise if I was patronising...<

Partial apology partially accepted I shall remember the good times, Ed.

Thanks again, everybody, but this is Captain Jackanapes signing off. Two-finger style

So Edward's apology is only partial because he apologised for being patronising, but didn't apologise for being a tw*t?

Surely he can't help it? The tw*t is in his jeans.

Now that Jack is gone, let's build a shrine to Noam Chomsky.

>>I haven't located my spare tire yet...

Not last time I looked. If I did have one there, Jack would have been confidently able to tell me to go myself.

esprit d'escalier:

I wonder if he's taught his two-finger sign-off to any babies.

Jaysus! How to destroy a one-liner with a C&P error.

The post before last...I was meant to be quoting Gnomon's jean reference.

Not that the one-liner needed much to destroy it.

What, can't tell a twat from a spare tire?

You just have to have the right altitude.

This post has been removed.

Ate? Freudian slip.

I was wondering, btw...'chod' and 'clod' seem to me to share a similar mental space. I was assuming that 'chod' is manure. So also not unadjacent to 'clod' in the earth sense.

Says a lot about how we learn language in the first place. I've never seen the word chod before and assumed a meaning from the context.

One of the most impressive things I saw on children's TV was years ago -- in the 80s maybe -- where a presenter spoke an unknown language, showing by gesture what he meant: I, you, head, foot, I have a head, you have a head, and so on. By the time he had got to 30 words he showed them on a board, and said, "You now have the first 30 words of this language. Is it Turkish? Is it Finnish? No, it's Rubbish! I made the lot up!" A lot of what you hear for the first time you can pick up from context.

Can't remember the name of the programme, it was the one where they said "Oo, I could crush a grape!"

My daughter (b. 1973) tells me it was Crackerjack.