While at work (daycare) today, a parent said of her husband “He really likes country music…the circle jerk that he is.” I asked her to repeat it. “…the circle jerk that he is.”
Instead of correcting her, I just let it drop. What’s the funniest/saddest misusage of a phrase you’ve heard?
Nothing quite so egregious as that but my mom can’t seem to grasp the difference between “fathom” and “phantom”. I’ve corrected her every time I’ve heard her misuse it for years now – it’s *that *jarring to my ears – but she continues to say the latter when she means the former.
My wife:
Not a native English speaker. We were visiting my sister in Pennsylvania for Christmas a couple of years ago. On the porch was a broom that they use to sweep the snow clear of the steps. My wife grabbed the broom, and rode it around the porch saying “Look! I’m a bitch!”
It took her a couple of minutes to realize why I was laughing so hard…
A friend of a friend got it stuck in his head that “behooved” meant “pissed off”. So when he got angry he’d say things like: “Man, that really BEHOOVES me!” No one bothered to correct him. It was too amusing.
A former (female) colleague of mine was explaining some wooden gizmo that one could run up and down one’s back as a sort of self-massage and she said that it was called a ‘woodie’.
I cast a sideways glance at my (male) supervisor and then we got the, “What? What did I say?” from her and she then asked if either of us had a woodie.
In between the smirks, I replied not at the moment but given a minute I could work on it.
A former co-worker (Barb) used to love to one-up everyone. If you had a flat tire, she has a blow out. She was annoying to the nth degree.
Another worker had a sleep study because of a sleeping disorder and we were discussing it one day. Turns out his sleep apnea was off the charts. We were talking about his treatment when Barb said “Oh I have a terrible issue with sleep. I have necrophilia.”
Sleep apnea co-worker started to say something until I crushed his foot under the table. Eff her, let her think she has the right word for narcolepsy 
I wish people would be more careful with their homonyms. The one that bothers me the most is “discreet” versus “discrete.” If you intend to keep something on the down low, you want to be discreet about it, not discrete. For ages I’ve been wanting to make a shirt with a cartoon of a guy hiding in a darkened closet, with a caption that says “discreet mathematics.”
I also wish people would stop writing that their curiosity or interest has been “peaked”, unless they really do mean it’s going nowhere but down from there.
I would like for people to stop using “ignorant” as a synonym for “rude.” That is not what it means.
I can’t remember how the conversation came around to it, but a friend of mine once told me that due to some gynecological problems his mother had had to have a lobotomy. After the uncontrollable spasm of laughter I explained to him the difference between a lobotomy and a hysterectomy. I really wish I’d been able to suppress that laughter because I think he felt foolish for having made the error, when it was just an honest mistake. But the image just got me.
You should do it! I know a few people who’d probably buy one.
Reminds me of Bender’s Computer Dating Service (“Discreet and Discrete - Now With More Discretion”)
One of my nephews was about 4 or 5 when the movie “Toy Story” was popular. In the stores they had a large sized [del]doll[/del] action figure (about 2 feet tall) of the main character.
Ben would continually embarrass his mother by telling everyone, “I want a big Woody for Christmas.”
Better still, I overheard at Target one year, from a guest to a salesperson, “Excuse me, do you have any twelve-inch Woodys?”
When I was in my first job after college, I had a boss who would call things that were unbelievable “hummers.” Don’t know if she was shooting for “humdinger” or what. But it cracked us up every time we heard her on the phone shouting, “oh my god, that’s a real hummer!” We finally took pity on her (sometimes she was talking to clients when she said it :eek: ) and told her what it meant in the popular vernacular. Oy.
Work Christmas party a couple of years ago was a harbour cruise. At the end of the cruise, we came in under the bridge, and approaching Circular Quay, the captain cut the throttle, and I overheard this:
“What happened?”
“Oh, the captain’s idolising the engine.”
My mother can never remember the difference between “unisex” and “bisexual.” It did make the prospect of coming out to her fairly amusing, though.
I am failing to make a connection between country music and anything remotely similar to “circle jerk”. Can someone explain to me what she thought she was saying.
And yes, I know what a circle jerk is.
I was at a circuit dinner, small but formal, with an elderly judge and his wife, and a couple of other lawyer types. Also attending was my female clerk (of about 22; old enough to know better).
Necessary background - in the local parlance, a “dill” is someone of uninspiring intellectual accomplishment. And there is a local habit of creating a species of diminutive or abbreviation by putting “O” on the end of words; “garbo” for garbage collector, “smoko” for smoke break. You get the idea. And I have no doubt you can see what’s coming.
Young clerk gets giggly on the wine and starts loudly and repeatedly referring to a particular witness as a “dildo”. She thought she just meant moron. The judge’s eyes widened like cartoon eyeballs. His wife choked quietly in the soup at first, but was gracious enough to pretend she had no idea what was being said. There were no other women present who could take my clerk aside and, um, explain things. And so the clerk thought she was a social hit and kept it up. Shouting it around the restaurant. It had become her buzz word (so to speak).
I was torn between mortification and laughter. I couldn’t tell her because she was so far in that to tell her then, she would have just DIED. Eventually she sobered up, and once we returned home from circuit, I had someone word her up. We never discussed it again. The most merciful outcome I can hope for her is deep, deep denial.
My old boss once told me that he had taken his cat to the vet to get it seduced before they flew somewhere.
Sedated, boss, sedated!
I’ve run into a number of people who will say they need to ‘unthaw’ some meat for supper.
While house hunting once, a realtor kept showing me photos of condos, but she kept saying things like, “This is a nice condom,” and, “You should look at this condom.”
I was visiting a friend once while his grandmother was over. This was when Rubik’s Cube had just become popular. The GM said, “Why don’t we get a Pubic Cube and we can all play with it?”
A female coworker was hospitalized because of angina.
A male coworker asked why they hospitalized her, just because of “female trouble.”