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Re:Ghoti by dang on Sunday June 21, 2020 @02:00PM (#23593825)
You're right! You can tell for sure that this is an antecedent because the last line is almost the same: "his drims fainali keim tru" vs. "Ze drem [...] vil finali kum tru".

Somewhere out there is a web page tracing this joke. When I googled this yesterday, there was just a haystack of drecky results repeating the joke. But once you have two sources, you can search for them together, and that tends to bring up better results. I just did that, and probably the best one I found was this alt.usage.english thread from 1999: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.usage.english/iw...

Note the marvelous reply: "Thanks for your effort to clear up this ongoing mis-attribution. I remember well "Meihem in ce Klasrum" when John W Campbell Jr published it.

Btw, the author is apparently "Dolton Edwards", not Dalton, and is said to be a pseudonym (which explains the satirical "Dolt") of someone named W.K. Lessing (edit: or K.W.? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114), about whom I didn't find anything when I looked.

I thought we had discussed this on HN before, too, but all I could find was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263, which you posted 4 years ago. Perhaps the next time this comes up, several years from now, one of us will at least find the current thread.

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