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I don't get it! Does it mean "delete Bush"?

Man, I guess I'd better turn in my old Commodore Vic 20 and upgrade to something more modern if I'm ever going to get these jokes.

It's a tag. As used in HTML the dual angle brackets with the slash closes the command. E.g., in order to italicize something in HTML you put the text between two pairs of angle brackets each of which contains an "i" indicating "italics", (I'll use square brackets here instead otherwise you'd just see the italics and not the markup language), [i]No more Bush[/]

You need to close the tag out otherwise it will continue to take effect and your entire text will be italicized rather than just the snippet you intended. So it means Close Bush, or End Bush.

I'm a geek but I hack natural languages (principally Arabic and Persian) and I'm not a programmer so I don't know if that also has a meaning in any other programming languages.

Oops, make that:

[i]No More Bush[/i]

Thanks, Barry!

Hey wait just a minute there, Chris. Your e-mail addy says you are affiliated with RIT, i.e. The Rochester Institute of Technology. While that doesn't necessarily make you a geek (unless you're like my old man, the engineer, who knows COBOL and FORTRAN pretty damn good but that's about it), you should be awash in a sea of geekdom.

Just funnin' ya a bit, though I am curious.

I knew my email address was going to get me in trouble, especially when I asked that question! Believe it or not, RIT isn't all computers--I'm a prof in their college of liberal arts, so we're geeks of a different sort (we go to libraries and get high on all the dust in the stacks, rather than play DOOM all day long). I'd have asked my students, who'd have died laughing at the picture, but classes don't start yet for another week and I just had to get the joke.

Now don't I feel stupid. I'm in the humanities too (still in grad school though, well...it's a very long story). And I've got a fair number of friends who have gotten such jobs at tech universities. D'oh!

I created a cafepress shop full of crap.
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