The Gender of Computer - Le French Class

A French Language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine.  For example, “house” in French is feminine - ”la maison”; “pencil” in French, is masculine - “le crayon”.

One puzzled student asked, “What gender is computer?”

The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary. So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether “computer” should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men’s group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender (”la computer”), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;

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2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;

3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review;
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4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
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The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine “le computer”) because:

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1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;

2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves;
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3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem;
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4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model.

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Verdict: The women won.

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The blogger received the following humorous response from Dr. JB Lim:
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Monday, 2 July, 2012 1:03 AM
From: lim juboo

My answer to your question is very simple and straight forward.

The computer is either a homosexual or is very confused machine.

Only yesterday I received an e-mail message telling me this:

'Lim Ju Boo, a Male from Malaysia wants to make friend and love with you. He is very eager to know you. Please click here to link up with him'. It even gave my e-mail address there, and sent that message to my same e-mail address. I instantly deleted it.

The computer must be a gay or a lesbian to match up the same sex person for partnership.  Either that, or it must be very mixed up and confused.

As I said a few days ago, the Internet is very weird.

- A bisexual human

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The blogger wrote the following on his Facebook in reply to a friend’s similar question on the above subject:

My conclusion is that the computer is neither masculine nor feminine. It is just a machine, but I tend to agree with Dr JB Lim in that it is a very CONFUSED machine because it is at the mercy of the WEIRD users!