• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    1 year ago

    There was a short story I read ages ago in some collection somewhere I’ve been dying to find. I think it was from the 60s or 70s, but a scientist brings a man from the future and the man is just a normal guy, so he can’t explain anything to the scientist’s satisfaction and the scientist gets more and more exasperated.

    The dialogue was like:

    “What is the dominant mode of transport in the future?”

    “Oh, we fleem.”

    “Fleem? What’s fleem?”

    “It’s a kind of garbol but with more slimp.”

    “Okay, never mind. How do you do it?”

    “Oh, that’s easy, you simply merfingle the blem and you’re fleeming away!”

    “WHAT IS THE BLEM?!?”

        • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reminds me of a short story I read in the 70s. I ended up having to go to the house I read it in (a decade ago) to find the book it was in, now everyone in my family owns copies of that book (Alfred Hitchcock’s Best in Suspense if I recall, not getting up to look) just so we can do Halloween readings of the story that made us all jump every time we saw anything move out of the corner for our eyes for like a week the first time we read it. They Bite by Anthony Boucher. Great story.