the pragmatics of mincedmeat pies and christmas crackers

So today I was introduced for the first time to two important Christmas-related phenomena: mincedmeat pies and christmas crackers. First let me tell you that I was invited today to attend a talk at the British Computer Society about a Machine Translation system called Deja Vu. It was interesting to see a demo of the system in action, and as usual I asked the presenter if he could show us an example with Arabic texts. But since he didn't know the language, he couldn't answer my question about how would grammar diacritics (tashkeel تشكيل) be dealt with in the system and integrated into the translation memory or the database. But he gave us a cd of a trial version of the system, so maybe I'll just try that myself.

Then after the talk we went for dinner in a nice restaurant in the old Covent Garden market. This is where the Christmas fun began. We were 7 people all together, all very nice academics with a great sense of humour and interest in computational linguistics and translation. So where does pragmatics come in? Well, as I was checking their Christmas menu for dessert I read that they have mincedmeat pies, and I thought : that's odd! how come they have minced meat as a dessert? Contextual assumption missing: a mincedmeat pie does not have minced meat, it actually has fruit and it's very sweet. I had to try it anyway. So it came with some clotted cream on the side and that tasted exactly like butter to me. But it was nice. The other pragmatically interpreted part was when they gave us all christmas crackers. So I learned how you are supposed to open them (it takes two people each pulling from one side) and in there were crackers, balloons, coloured stripes, paper crowns, and jokes. We went around reading aloud our jokes. Let me give you two examples:

What lies on the seabed and quivers?
A nervous wreck.

What is long, green and goes hith, hith?
A snake with a lisp.

Aren't they pragmatically interesting? :) But I think one important contextual assumption here is that Christmas jokes are not supposed to be really funny :) The ones that were funny were the so-called "mummy mummy jokes" which one of the academics told us about. They generally go like this:

A: mummy, mummy, why is dad running in the garden?
B: shut up and help me load the shot gun.

It was a very fun evening, acedemically and personally. I came home about half an hour ago, with a lot of coloured stripes wrapped around my neck :) (and I am also wearing the paper crown now :) )

Mai