The Wireless Catalog, associated with Wisconsin Public Radio, came yesterday. The cover shows people wearing t-shirts with sayings on them. The shirts are on sale. One said:
"On a scale from 1 to 10, what is your favorite color of the alphabet?"
I like screwy questions. I think the first question I ever heard that struck me as screwy was "When did you stop beating your wife?" I was a pre-teen and I realized many answers could be construed as admitting the answerer was a wife beater. I knew that a lawyer or interrogator might purposely construct a question that had a good chance of getting someone in trouble, regardless of their guilt or innocence.
The t-shirt question is a lovely construction. The scale, my favorite, the matter of colors and the alphabet clash so fully, that I feel a little breathless after reading the question. Specifying that the answer should be on the scale is like other inappropriate specifications: "Yes or no, what time is it?"
What people do with such a question is often interesting. I wondered who had constructed the question and thought I would look it up in Google. I only gave Google the words up to "color" and got 4.9 million hits. I calculated using Excel that it would take me more than 3 years of looking at the search results 12 hours a day every day. That's too much time and effort, even though it would be a very important project. Besides after the first thousand or so, the results might not be very interesting or entertaining.
I did look at this page, which states the full question as on the shirt. The first of several answers was "green, because fish don't wear hats." Seems like an appropriately cockeyed answer to me. That answer charmed someone to the point she wrote a congratulatory comment to the composer of the green answer.
I had a friend about 50 years ago who habitually refused food or drink that he didn't want with the answer "No, thanks, I just had a bar of soap." Of course, most people assumed they had misheard what he said. Others just gave the guy a wary look of wonder.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
