The Elderberries by Corey Pandolph and Phil Frank and Joe Troise for June 22, 2022
June 21, 2022
June 23, 2022
Transcript:
Evelyn: Wow! What a lovely Christmas tree! Boone: Yep! Ludmilla just brought it in! Evelyn: Gee.... the ones I saw for sale looked really scrawny! Boone: Ludmilla! Where'd you get this great tree? Nurse Ludmilla: You see nutting! You know nutting!
The CIA set up a computer to enable them to quickly and automatically translate to and from Russian. Searching for a suitable phrase to test the machine they came up with “Out of sight out of mind” (that, to digress, surely says a lot about the shortcomings of the CIA). They fed this into the computer which duly spat out some Russian (exactly what that was isn’t recorded, which surely says a lot about the shortcomings of language instruction in the English Speaking world) which they then fed back in. Out came the perfectly well-formed English phrase “Invisible imbecile”.