Tireless or unchanging?

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Or something else:

As you can see in the embiggened version, this is the display on an Italian vending machine, providing an English version of "La macchina non dà resto" = "Machine does not give change".

[h/t Andrea Mazzucchi]



11 Comments

  1. Tom S. Fox said,

    November 3, 2014 @ 4:37 pm

    It’s spelled “dà.”

    [(myl) OK, fixed. I would have gotten it right but I relied on the Italian person who sent me the information — anyhow that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.]

  2. Rubrick said,

    November 3, 2014 @ 5:24 pm

    Clearly a machine translation error. ;-)

  3. Jan said,

    November 3, 2014 @ 5:53 pm

    Would we have assumed that it "did" rest because it was an Italian machine?

  4. Martin J Ball said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 12:17 am

    Rise of the cyborgs ….

  5. Ryan Griffiths said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 3:28 am

    While Tom is right is pointing out that it is spelled 'dà', displays incapable of rendering accents will most often replace an accent with an apostrophe in order to avoid confusion with the unaccented form, in this case the preposition 'da' or 'of/from'.

    [(myl) Good point — that's probably what led Andrea to send "da' resto" as the Italian version.]

  6. Keith said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 3:55 am

    @Tom, I wonder if the Italian string is indeed da' because the LCD screen cannot display dà….

  7. leoboiko said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 5:35 am

    Sorry for the poor picture, but once I found this mystery message at our office's coffee machine. That's “MONEDA 40 = bΩD”. I'm still unsure about which conspiracy is responsible.

  8. Marek said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 6:09 am

    @Rubrick: Good one :-)

  9. Ginger Yellow said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 7:27 am

    Looks like they cut off the rest of the message: "It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you insert coin."

    [(myl) You win the comments section for this post, passing Rubrick down the home stretch.]

  10. Bob Ladd said,

    November 4, 2014 @ 4:16 pm

    The replacement of grave accent by apostrophe is indeed common in Italian, even on signs and in official contexts. This works primarily because, thanks to various oddities of Italian orthography and phonology, the accent is not used in many words, and occurs almost exclusively on word-final vowels. So it's not too disruptive to write citta' instead of città or piu' instead of pi&ugrave. Compare what would happen if you tried to use apostrophes instead of accents in French and produced stuff like a' peu pre's or elle e'tait de'sole'e for à peu près and elle était désolée.

  11. Chalkie said,

    November 5, 2014 @ 3:11 pm

    Now look what you made me do!

    I've been looking for a simple easter egg to put into the software I'm working on, and this dialog box is now it.

    Could I verberize that and say I've "Egged my software" (like over-egging the cake?)
    (ref xkcd )

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