Fencing the Largest Area

Title: Fencing the Largest Area

General Information about Item:

  • Verbal lore, joke
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Ulf Österberg
  • Date Collected: 5-23-19

Informant Data:

  • Ulf Österberg has been a engineering professor at Dartmouth College since 1989. He teaches classes such as ENGS 23, Distributed Systems and Fields and ENGS 26, Control Theory. He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden and lived in Sweden until after he had earned his PhD in optics.

Contextual Data:

  • Cultural Context: Jokes were not common in classroom settings at the schools the informant attended, but he strongly believes that jokes are helpful for keeping students engaged and makes an effort to tell jokes such as this one in his classes. This joke includes a clever logical trick that you might expect to find in a mathematical proof to allow the mathematician to best the engineer. It also provides an example of a woman using her intelligence to beat a man who simply tries to use strength.
  • Social Context: This joke was recorded during an in-person interview with the informant. This joke was specifically intended to be told to students when it was relevant to the class. Telling jokes helps to connect students to the class and to the professor. The joke was originally heard with a cowboy and an ordinary person, but the informant turned it into an engineering joke to tell in classes.

Item:

Interview Recording:

Transcript of joke:

  • (4:54) “So what we have here is an engineer and the engineer… And its very appropriate to do it this way. This is not the way I first heard it, but in my retelling of this joke the engineer is this macho male and his opponent that he’s gonna compete against is a female mathematician. And the whole thing is that they are gonna try, from the time the sun comes up to the time the sun sets, they’re gonna try to fence in the largest area, and the engineer thinks he’s gonna win because he’s this big strong man, but he also prepares himself, so he makes sure he has a lot of posts, he has a lot of barbed wire, he looks at the terrain, you know, “I don’t want to go up in that direction, because that’s gonna be more work” and he really thinks this through to get the biggest area. Uh, the female mathematician is a little bit more or less [unknown], and is like, not too worried,  ‘yeah I have a few posts, some barbed wire, its gonna be fine.’ Ok, the day comes; the engineer is ready. He gets started immediately and, um, the female mathematician, she also gets up and puts a few posts in and some barbed wire around it and then she has a parasol and she goes and sits under it because it’s a hot sun, and there she sits, and sips some lemonade or whatever most of the day, eats and reads math books. Um, the sun sets and the judge says… You know, the engineer managed by running the last bit with the barbed wire [to] get it around the first post and really enclosing this big area and the, uh, referee says, ‘well, it’s pretty clear who won,’ and the female mathematician says, ‘well, wait a minute.’ She jumps into her little fencing thing and she says, ‘I define this as outside.'”

Informant’s Comments:

  • The informant said he grew up telling jokes in Sweden, but he had difficulty learning how to tell jokes and especially puns in English.

Collector’s Comments:

  • It is interesting to see how the informant took a joke he had heard in one context and turned it into a piece of engineering folklore for the specific purpose of performing it in a classroom.

Collector’s Name: Ben Wolsieffer

Tags/Keywords:

  • Engineering
  • Verbal Folklore
  • Joke
  • Comparison between fields

 

 

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