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} No, that's right, no human has produced COBOL. This horrid language,
} which can parch even Eddie Murphy's throat, was invented by an evil
} breed of German midgets known as the COBOLds. They were squat, ugly
} creatures with small piggish eyes, filthy beards, large axes, bad
} temper, aunts named Gretchen, silly hoods, stumpy teeth, strict
} herring-and-potatoes diets, short stubby fingers, large smelly feet and
} a lisp of the sort that might be cute on little half-elves with tight
} pants and tits that defy the laws of gravity, but it most certainly
} wasn't cute on them. The COBOLds used to live in German copper mines,
} from which they abducted the copper and replaced it with cobalt, a
} stupid metal they'd bought *en masse* from a mail order firm that
} advertised in the back pages of *The L.A. Freep*. Such were the ways
} of the COBOLds. But when they had tucked away all the copper in Germany
} way down in their subterranean closets, the mines obviously had to be
} closed down. And the COBOLds got cross because they had nobody to annoy
} anymore. For a while, they just sat there, picking their runny noses
} with their short, stubby fingers and tried to find out new ways to get
} on humankind's nerves. Gradually, an evil plot developed. They began
} to infiltrate the computer world, hiding under mouse mats, in 80MB hard
} disk drives, in empty Chinese takeaway cartons, in those stupid RS-232
} ports, yes, unsuspected by us, they became part of the *programming
} environment*. And then, just as they had done in their old mines, they
} began to snatch away pieces of code and replace it with long, rambling
} word sequences (remember that they of German origin were, and life-long
} experience of lots of words to incomprehensible verb constructions make
} together put have) such as:
}
} "ADD TWO TO TWO GIVING FIVE"
}
} Soon, there was no normal code left, and every new piece of code
} produced near a COBOLd abode was instantly replaced by these horrible
} ramblings. And so, the programmers resigned and learned to program in
} COBOL, a habit which over the years gradually wore their fingers down to
} short stumps, much like COBOLd fingers. And that's probably what these
} despicable gnomes were after in the first place, envious as they are,
} those foul pixies, those gruesome brownies, those malodourous mannekins,
} those sinister sprites, etc. etc. (I don't like them)
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