I need an old guy who knows chess history to listen to a short audio passage in old-fashioned French in order to decipher a joke- a joke that depends on a deep understanding of both chess history and European idiom.

The thing is that I want to debut this information for the first time in Chess Documentary that might take me a year to complete.

*European idiom* lol, well said- I meant the "idioms of various countries within Europe."

Among English speakers at our website, <dom> is more familiar than anyone I'm aware of with a variety of idioms from different European countries, and also "across time."

Pardon my French.

I suspect that statistics and surveys and such would anecdotally suggest that (1) stupid people have nothing that I would recognize as a sense of humour, though they may think they do and may guffaw/lol regularly at themselves, and (2) people without a sensa yuma are often dim.

Knowledge is what makes jokes based on allusions work, but only if the listener knows enough to "get it". Most of your humor, for example, takes a good bit of knowledge. It keeps the brain moving.

<Is that the yeast common de-dom-inator?>

The original idea came from some Germans who created the notion of <the implied reader>, a sort of imaginary construct which every text creates as it goes along.

I just took this a step further, by pointing out that certain texts -- especially those that use irony or 'clever' codes -- work only because the (smart) reader can picture themselves as being superior to the (not so smart) reader. This *dumkopflehrer* is the Implied Bimbo.

So ... whenever you're pleased at 'getting' some joke, you're essentially feeling superior to some hypothetical idiot who wouldn't get it. The implied bimbo again: there are no gender requirements, incidentally. Stupidity suffices.

Like any pious young priest
I eat almost nothing but yeast
Because it is plain
We must all rise again
And I want to get started, at least.

<The Implied Bimbo> I like it. It captures something otherwise ineffable.

Keine problemo.

The Canadian idiom includes 'eh', along with a tendency to replace 't' with 'd' intervocalically: "Eh, a riding desk, eh".

African idioms are trickier, as they break down into Maghrebi, Nilo-Semitic, Bantu, etc. But if most of the words and names start with 'm', that's a clue.

This is not true in British idiom, however, as you well know. Perhaps the best known example comes from <Mick Jagger>:

Innaresting word, 'poor'. It can denote poverty ("Have you met The Poor? Charming people, but they're so terribly, well, *poor*..." - Robin Hood) or empathy ("you poor thing" ... which should not be taken literally to mean 'You are inanimate and have no wealth').

And then there are monks and nuns who take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. So why then, for example, are they called 'Poor Clares'? Shouldn't it be 'Poor, Chaste, Obedient Clares'?

Speakina chastity - not Chazz Bono -- I see that asexuality is the new hip gender preference. They even have meetings, which seems pointless somehow.

tsk, tsk. or was it supposed to allude to a mix of german/spanish/esperanto? :o)

Latin is your only man.

With a modest amount of Latin, all those other languages fall into place. French is a Celtified Latin spoken through the nose. Spanish is Arabized Latin spoken very fast, and Portuguese is an archaic but rugged mixture of both. So is Catalan. Romanian is Latin with a Slavic undervest and a tendency to end words with 'u'.

We also use Interlingua and Volapuk. Frogspawn is like the zombie movie theatre of dead languages.

For instance 'Volapuk' means 'I want to throw up' in Interlingua, which means 'between their tongues' in something else. Idioglossa, maybe.

I forget: dim sum.