Funniest grammatical errors

Cafe Society
1

I used to teach English in Japan. We used to keep a file on the funniest mistakes our students made. (Not to be mean. Just to keep us sane when we were stressed.) I cannot remember many of them.
One of them was when a teacher,Bob, was asking a student about another (female) teacher, who happened to be sitting behind Bob. The student trying to point out the female teacher said “She is the one in your behind”.

I saw one on youtube about a clip about Hugh Laurie. The woman wrote "I love Hugh Laurie and if he was single i wouldve asked him to bare my children. "(sic)

2

You’ll find plenty of examples like the ones you’ve encountered at www.engrish.com.

3

Might as well get this one out of the way:

“All your base are belong to us.”

4

If this one isn’t an urban legend:
American student of French writing about the past, “Quand je regarde ma derriere, je vois qu’elle est partagee en trois parties.”

5

Years ago, a Russian guy I was dating, who normally spoke excellent English, made a doozy of an error.

He was in a computer programming training program run in-house at a local company, and it was known to be very tough, with lots of homework. He came home from work one day looking stressed, yet amused, so I asked what had happened.

Apparently one guy in the group hadn’t done the homework, and the (female) teacher got very upset with him. Or as my then-boyfriend put it, “She *really *went down on him! In front of the whole class and everything! It made us all really uncomfortable to watch.”

6

This isn’t an error, but it is really strange. I found it when my husband and I were trying to find out if we could buy real estate over here. Give the video a few seconds to start, and turn your speakers on.

7

There’s no link. However, I can say that this whole post is VERY reminiscent of what someone who planned to post a “screamer” would write.

8

oops. :smack: try this: we sell we buy

Really, it isn’t a screamer. I swear. Those things are beyond annoying. Don’t turn your speakers up, just have them on.

9

My apologies, Renee. Screamers, as they say on another message board, hang my munchkin so I may be a little paranoid about them.

That video is…bizarre. Very bizarre. I had to shake myself from being hypnotized by the rapidly changing faces. And it seems to go on…well, forever…

10

Strictly Confidential. … Yet we might plaster your picture all over our commercial. Hmmmm

11

One from a friend who taught English in Spain. In a composition about hobbies, one of her students wrote:

The student had looked up ‘sobre todo’ (=above all, especially) in a Spanish-English dictionary. ‘Sobretodo’ is an old-fashioned word for overcoat.

12

Here in the English Language Department we love:

“We need two short class teachers.”

You see they left out the hyphen in “short-class,” and so changed it from one modifier to two, and so changed the meaning! Some people say we should get out more.

13

There was also a news photo caption from Nicaragua in the 1980s showing the aftermath of a battle that referred to “Contra fighters and two short Sandinistas”.

The “short” was a mistranslation of “bajas Sandinistas” - Sandinista casualties. “Bajo” or “baja” means “low” but the translator extended that to “short”.