advising pipe activating

In the long years through deep space, sometimes I thought we'd lost our sense of humour.

"Good to see you Niall," I said to my old friend, a genuine wooden owl from Earth.
"Cuckoo," said Niall.

Last night, over breakfast, Stanton had lured me into another of his sociolinguistic arguments. Kay Stanton was always willing to drag out the same old hash, why we bothered with a 24 hour cycle on board a spacecraft when we could pick 25 and give everyone a little more time in the day.

Stanton like myself was on an antipodal timeshift so we ate our dinner in the morning and our breakfast at night.

Which on a spacecraft is purely a semantic discrimination.

I didn't worry like Stanton, I worried about other things, like had our language become stilted and reserved having dealt so long with the logic and abstraction which defines our episteme?

As I often wondered, with our heads so full of centuries of knowledge, had we lost our sense of humour?

"Come on Stephen, just because we have the same laryngeal position as our forebears doesn't mean we have to retain all their eccentricities!"

As a professional historian and closet libertine, it was exactly such language that 'freaked the bejayzus out of me.'"