Here is a medical footnote to Rosanne's researches on booger anaphora.
I feel the need to quote Dave Barry again:
Isn't modern technology amazing? A hundred years ago, if you had told people that some day there would be a giant network of incredibly sophisticated ''thinking machines'' that would allow virtually anybody, virtually anywhere on Earth, to hear a herring cut the cheese, they would have beaten you to death with sticks.
Just substitute "to read a Pakistani newspaper report about an Austrian doctor's speculation that eating snot is good for you" -- or some other amazing example of internet information transmission -- for the phrase in red. The original Ananova report is here, but the Pakistani version has a higher stick factor, in my view.
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 31, 2004 07:45 AM