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20 Responses to Time Travel
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“Time travel is going to have made grammar more complex.”
Nice comic, Doug. 🙂
huh?
: )
Time travel grammar “willan haven been” a complex thingy according to Douglas Adams. 🙂
Not at all. In fact, there is extensive writing on the subject of the complex grammar necessitated by time travel.
Here are but a few resources:
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1126595
* http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=35231
* http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravelTenseTrouble
But one of the most, if you will, improbably authoritative texts is the from the Guide itself:
* http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html
Time travel isn’t what it used to be!
(Ba-da-ding!)
And now we know what Dr. Who is really thinking. Timey-Wimey is just how he tries to explain it without using verbs.
This reminds me viscerally of the summer I spent studying French verb conjugations so I could pass my language entrance exam for grad school.
This cartoon has been so funny, when I’m going to read it.
&=^
For more of this kind of thing read Douglas Adams’ book: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
watching Doctor Who has already established… will establish… that time is a wibbley, wobbley ball of timey-wimey stuff.
Great Comic. Is this an intentional homage to Douglas Adams, or merely coincidental? Adams has some really nice stuff about the grammar of time travel in his book “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” (part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series).
Here’s a link to a a post with some of the content:
http://forum.newsarama.com/archive/index.php/t-41196.html
@Doublejay – just a coincidence – but his work is brilliant and definitely worth an homage or two. This cartoon came from a combination of my unhealthy interest in grammar, and watching a lot of Doctor Who this week!
@Seth – Nice! Definitely worth a ba-da-ding!
was, were, has been, is going to be confusing… 🙂
Sounds like chicken needs a transmogrifier!
Future Perfect Continuous. I like.
Red Dwarf offered the following gem:
“Sir. Now is not the time to be conjugating temporal verbs in the past-and-possible-never tense”.
What does it mean??? present with past????otherwise the meaning of Time Travel…”Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects (or in some cases just information) backwards in time to some moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period”
Beam me up Snotty…There is no sign of intelligent life down here…
Intelligent time travel seems paradoxymoronic
NICE.