It’s geek humor for Presidents Day. I think it’s geek humor. Computational Complexity analyzed the story attributed to Abraham Lincoln, about the moral of asking how many legs a dog has, if you call a tail “a leg.”
Amazing five-legged dog, image by Esther Derby.com
The author acknowledged it, but we now know it was a calf’s tail, not a dog’s tail.
Lincoln’s telling of this story makes perfect sense to me because his comments about slavery and race also cut through the cant.
By the way, I just read a fascinating new book about the writers of that era: The War On Words.