A reply to Alejandro Ramos' ope-l 4134.
I have a feeling that Ale thought my comment, "please," may have been meant to
suggest that he was being pedantic. It wasn't.
It was a reference to an old (and sexist) joke of Henny Youngman's. He was a
famous Jewish-American comedian. The joke was "Take my wife --- please!"
The joke is a pun, based on two meanings of "take" in English. "Take my wife"
could mean, and Youngman's intonation leads us to believe that he means,
"Consider my wife, for example." But "Take my wife" can also mean "remove my
wife," i.e., take her away from me. The "please" at the end makes it funny
(or not, that depends on one's tastes), because we thought he meant the
former, but the "please" tells us he really meant the latter.
It is possible to use apply this schema in many creative ways. For instance,
wouldn't it be nice to begin a paper this way?:
The Okishio theorem has its ideological roots in some simple arguments that
were put forth by others more than a half-century. Take Tugan-Baranowsky's
_Theoretische Grundlagen des Marxismus_ [1905], Ch.VII, part III_. [1]
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[1] --- please!
So my comment was a pun based on Ale's use of the word "take," and implicitly
a comment on Tugan.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Forgive me --- please!
Andrew Kliman