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Like the joke of the guy returning to Boston after being away for years; asks his cab driver "Do you know where I can get scrod" and the driver says "Sure, but I've never heard that in the past perfect before!"

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This might be the first time I get a joke's punchline but not the setup

Scrod is the name for a small whitefish; he was looking for a seafood restaurant.

You can create infinite such jokes that end with:

…and the duck said to the bartender, “put it on my bill”

Hmmm. When I heard that joke long ago, the driver said it was the pluperfect subjunctive. And here I took his word for it.

Same thing. From Wikipedia: "The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English"

Another especially funny part of that joke for me is that this is set in Boston (which has a couple of important colleges) ... because someone once told me that a lot of post-graduates of that college I was attending were driving taxicabs in that city.

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