From: ontologist_2000 Date: 2002-08-13T20:34:57+09:00 Subject: Re: Choosing ruby? Rhymes wrote: > On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 17:57:36 GMT, "Hal E. Fulton" > wrote: > > >Heh, no. One semester only, long ago. > >What does the quote mean? > > It's not so funny in English, because it's a padory of an italian tv > spot. The spot claims - (Tiziana da Milano: "avevo un fidanzato, poi > � arrivato Halo") - and - literally in English is "i had a boyfriend, > then Halo did come" and mine sign says: " i had Halo, then a girlfiend > did come ;-)" > > Halo is the X-Box game > I really wondered about that Italian line: To begin with, I did not know (and still do not know) what X-box is nor what "the" X-Box game might be. Had Halo not been spelled with an uppercase initial , I would have assumed that a halo, a gloriole was meant and that the appearance of the fianc�e somehow defused it. Halo, however, was not in my Italian dictionary ( The golden disk that holy persons have hovering above their head is called "aureola" ) A subtle ambiguity results from the reversal of the tv spot: In the original, the idea is probably that Halo became a permanent replacement of the boyfriend. In the mirror image, this reads rather like a singular event: "I was playing with Halo (or whatever one is supposed to do with it) and then my fianc�e showed up." Otherwise, you'd probably say " but then I became engaged". Probably it is politically more correct to substitute toys for boyfriends than to substitute girlfriends for toys. ( I refrain from interpreting "girlfiend" as a Freudian slip.) Now we know it all Greetings Jan > > -- > Rhymes (rhymes@NOSPAMmyself.com) > http://www26.brinkster.com/rhymes > " avevo Halo, poi � arrivata la mia fidanzata ;-) "