One Of The Things Ford Prefect Had Always Found Hardest To Understand About Human Beings Was Their Habit Of Continually Stating And Repeating The Obviou

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One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about
human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious,
as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen
down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to
account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising
their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months'
consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one.
If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start
working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively
cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always
remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't
know about.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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