A young monk took his vows, and his first task at the monastery was to help the other monks hand-copy church statutes, psalms, laws, and so on. After working like that for about a week, our monk noticed that all the monks were copying these materials from the previous copy rather than from the original. Astonished by this, he expressed his surprise to the abbot: “Padre, if someone made a mistake in the first copy, it will repeat forever and can never be corrected, for there is nothing to compare it with!” “Hmm, my son,” the abbot replied, “we have actually been doing it this way for centuries… But, in principle, there is something to your reasoning!” — and with these words he went down into the dungeons, where the “original sources”, unopened for centuries, were kept in huge chests. And he disappeared. When almost a day had passed since his disappearance, the worried monk went down into those same cellars to look for the holy father. He found him at once — he was sitting in front of a huge open tome of calfskin, banging his head against the sharp stones of the dungeon and mooing something unintelligible. Blood ran down his face, covered in dirt and scratches, his hair was tangled, and his gaze was insane. “What is wrong with you, holy father?” cried the shocked young man. “What happened?!” “Celebrate,” the abbot groaned, “the word was: c-e-l-e-b-r-a-t-e! Not ‘celibate’!!!
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