Rio Grande River

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I just noticed an accidental joke I left in the GNOME dictionary docs.

To personalize the screenshot, I took an image of the dictionary looking up the definition of Albuquerque. It’s been this way through several generations of GNOME releases:

Dictionary Screenshot

This evening when I was checking docs for the 2.6 release I noticed what the search engine had returned:

Albuquerque

n : the largest city in New Mexico; located in central New Mexico on the Rio Grande river

Rio Grande river would be, uh, redundant. Like Sierra Nevada mountains or La Bajada hill.

6 Comments

  2. “Rio Grande” is spanish for “(Large||Great) River” … i.e., “Rio” = “River”.

    So “Rio Grande river” is like saying “Great River river”.

  3. Same way here in India we have Sahyadri Mountains, the original name for the western ghats and Sahyadri means “evergreen mountains” in Sanskrit!!

  4. Thanks, Ricardo, for explaining the joke. We use it and its variants here in the southwestern U.S. to make self-depracating fun of our gringo-ness, our inability to understand the Spanish words we have so blindly adopted.

  5. It’s not as bad as the el al amein battle…

    I think you should leave it in, not everybody who can read English can read Spanish.

  6. and here I was thinking that ‘syn: Albuquerque’ was the joke (albeit a lame one). Why is it listed as a synonym for itself?

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