It was Head of the Charles this weekend in Boston. Here was a conversation on the Weeks Footbridge:
- “Did you hear that one of the teams in the Eights is all government workers?”
- “No. How are they doing?”
- “Much better this year. They kept coming in last in previous races, so they sent someone to spy on the Harvard and Yale teams to try to find out the secret of their high performance.”
- “What did the spy tell them?”
- “At Harvard and Yale they have only one person yelling ‘The rest of you should row’.”
“crew” = group of people who row.
“team” = group of people.
“crew team” = group of people who row group of people.
Sorta like ATM machine.
The work of a pedant is never done.
During one of the blizzards in the mid-90s the joke running around had mayor Marion Barry telling the work crews “We’ve run out of snow shovels, so you’ll just have to lean on each other”…..