My father-in-law is a professor of German, and he tells a joke about a German professor whose friend found him in the neighborhood bar, weeping inconsolably over his beer.
"What's wrong?" the friend asked.
Between sobs, the professor told him, "I've been working for years on my ten-volume treatise, and the publisher just told me that they don't have the budget to publish the last volume--they will only publish the first nine."
"Nine out of ten--that's not so bad," his friend tried to console him.
But the professor could not be cheered up so easily. "You don't understand," he wailed, "all the verbs were in the last volume!"
