One of my former professors at UT has a tendency to recruit lots of Chinese-speaking graduate students and colleagues – probably a natural inclination since he’s obviously still most comfortable speaking Chinese, himself.
So he’s adopted the habit of making many of his email subjects bilingual – a string of characters, followed by english words.
Today he sent out something about the research approval process at our local public hospital system. What did my mental parser make of a string of meaningless characters? Well, something like: “%#@!: HCHD approval process” … and I thought “Well, yes, I’ve often thought that myself, but I’m rather surprised to see him posting it as a widely-distributed email subject line!
Snicker.
Scrappy Blog 