excuse : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

I remember once being on a station platform in Cleveland at four in the morning. A black porter was carrying my bags, and as we were waiting for the train to come in, he said to me: "Excuse me, Mr. Cooke, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I have a bet with a friend of mine. Who composed the opening theme music of 'Omnibus'? My friend said Virgil Thomson." I asked him, "What do you say?" He replied, "I say Aaron Copeland." I said, "You're right." The porter said, "I knew Thomson doesn't write counterpoint that way." I told that to a network president, and he was deeply unimpressed. -- Alistair Cooke
Not me, guy. I read the Bash man page each day like a Jehovah's Witness reads the Bible. No wait, the Bash man page IS the bible. Excuse me... (More on confusing aliases, taken from comp.os.linux.misc)
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. (Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum)
Please excuse me, I have to circuit an AC line through my head to get this database working.
A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me", he said, "may I examine it?" The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard", said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human." "Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?" The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it under foot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Norbert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Weiner was, in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him: when they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes, Daddy, Mommy thought you would forget." The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened... -- Richard Harter
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse. -- Thomas Szasz
"If you'll excuse me a minute, I'm going to have a cup of coffee." - broadcast from Apollo 11's LEM, "Eagle", to Johnson Space Center, Houston July 20, 1969, 7:27 P.M.
Dead? No excuse for laying off work.
"Any excuse will serve a tyrant." -- Aesop
Any excuse will serve a tyrant. -- Aesop
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done.
QOTD: "There may be no excuse for laziness, but I'm sure looking."
Climbing onto a bar stool, a piece of string asked for a beer. "Wait a minute. Aren't you a string?" "Well, yes, I am." "Sorry. We don't serve strings here." The determined string left the bar and stopped a passer-by. "Excuse, me," it said, "would you shred my ends and tie me up like a pretzel?" The passer-by obliged, and the string re-entered the bar. "May I have a beer, please?" it asked the bartender. The barkeep set a beer in front of the string, then suddenly stopped. "Hey, aren't you the string I just threw out of here?" "No, I'm a frayed knot."
Fishing, with me, has always been an excuse to drink in the daytime. -- Jimmy Cannon
Seems that a pollster was taking a worldwide opinion poll. Her question was, "Excuse me; what's your opinion on the meat shortage?" In Texas, the answer was "What's a shortage?" In Poland, the answer was "What's meat?" In the Soviet Union, the answer was "What's an opinion?" In New York City, the answer was "What's excuse me?"
Youth doesn't excuse everything. -- Dr. Janice Lester (in Kirk's body), "Turnabout Intruder", stardate 5928.5.
A MODERN FABLE Aesop's fables and other traditional children's stories involve allegory far too subtle for the youth of today. Children need an updated message with contemporary circumstance and plot line, and short enough to suit today's minute attention span. The Troubled Aardvark Once upon a time, there was an aardvark whose only pleasure in life was driving from his suburban bungalow to his job at a large brokerage house in his brand new 4x4. He hated his manipulative boss, his conniving and unethical co-workers, his greedy wife, and his snivelling, spoiled children. One day, the aardvark reflected on the meaning of his life and his career and on the unchecked, catastrophic decline of his nation, its pathetic excuse for leadership, and the complete ineffectiveness of any personal effort he could make to change the status quo. Overcome by a wave of utter depression and self-doubt, he decided to take the only course of action that would bring him greater comfort and happiness: he drove to the mall and bought imported consumer electronics goods. MORAL OF THE STORY: Invest in foreign consumer electronics manufacturers. -- Tom Annau
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. -- Charlie McCarthy
Something better... 1 (obvious): Excuse me. Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face? 2 (meteorological): Everybody take cover. She's going to blow. 3 (fashionable): You know, you could de-emphasize your nose if you wore something larger. Like ... Wyoming. 4 (personal): Well, here we are. Just the three of us. 5 (punctual): Alright gentlemen. Your nose was on time but you were fifteen minutes late. 6 (envious): Oooo, I wish I were you. Gosh. To be able to smell your own ear. 7 (naughty): Pardon me, Sir. Some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't mind putting that thing away. 8 (philosophical): You know. It's not the size of a nose that's important. It's what's in it that matters. 9 (humorous): Laugh and the world laughs with you. Sneeze and it's goodbye, Seattle. 10 (commercial): Hi, I'm Earl Schibe and I can paint that nose for $39.95. 11 (polite): Ah. Would you mind not bobbing your head. The orchestra keeps changing tempo. 12 (melodic): Everybody! "He's got the whole world in his nose." -- Steve Martin, "Roxanne"
Mere nonexistence is a feeble excuse for declaring a thing unseeable. You can see dragons. You just have to look in the right direction. -- John Hasler
A blind rabbit was hopping through the woods, tripping over logs and crashing into trees. At the same time, a blind snake was slithering through the same forest, with identical results. They chanced to collide head-on in a clearing. "Please excuse me, sir, I'm blind and I bumped into you accidentally," apologized the rabbit. "That's quite all right," replied the snake, "I have the same problem!" "All my life I've been wondering what I am," said the rabbit, "Do you think you could help me find out?" "I'll try," said the snake. He gently coiled himself around the rabbit. "Well, you're covered with soft fur, you have a little fluffy tail and long ears. You're... hmmm... you're probably a bunny rabbit!" "Great!" said the rabbit. "Thanks, I really owe you one!" "Well," replied the snake, "I don't know what I am, either. Do you suppose you could try and tell me?" The rabbit ran his paws all over the snake. "Well, you're low, cold and slimey..." And, as he ran one paw underneath the snake, "and you have no balls. You must be an attorney!"
It seems these two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air balloon to cross the United States. After forty hours in the air, George turned to Harry, and said, "Harry, I think we've drifted off course! We need to find out where we are." Harry cools the air in the balloon, and they descend to below the cloud cover. Slowly drifting over the countryside, George spots a man standing below them and yells out, "Excuse me! Can you please tell me where we are?" The man on the ground yells back, "You're in a balloon, approximately fifty feet in the air!" George turns to Harry and says, "Well, that man must be a lawyer". Replies Harry, "How can you tell?". "Because the information he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally useless!" That's the end of The Joke, but for you people who are still worried about George and Harry: they end up in the drink, and make the front page of the New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer".
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. -- Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum
Not me, guy. I read the Bash man page each day like a Jehovah's Witness reads the Bible. No wait, the Bash man page IS the bible. Excuse me... -- More on confusing aliases, taken from comp.os.linux.misc
A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary. Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now has no excuse for further procrastination.
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done.
I for one cannot protest the recent M.T.A. fare hike and the accompanying promises that this would in no way improve service. For the transit system, as it now operates, has hidden advantages that can't be measured in monetary terms. Personally, I feel that it is well worth 75 cents or even $1 to have that unimpeachable excuse whenever I am late to anything: "I came by subway." Those four words have such magic in them that if Godot should someday show up and mumble them, any audience would instantly understand his long delay.
People seem to think that the blanket phrase, "I only work here," absolves them utterly from any moral obligation in terms of the public -- but this was precisely Eichmann's excuse for his job in the concentration camps.
Excuse me, but didn't I tell you there's NO HOPE for the survival of OFFSET PRINTING?