Re: Choosing ruby?

Rhymes wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 17:57:36 GMT, "Hal E. Fulton"
> <hal9000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
> è 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 fiancée
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 fiancée 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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
> http://www26.brinkster.com/rhymes
> " avevo Halo, poi è arrivata la mia fidanzata ;-) "