Great Moments In Language History *snork*

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I must admit, I have taken the English language for granted. The nuance, the poetry, the subtle meanings of each word.

When a great linguist expresses something new to the world, it is like a birth of words, flowing forth with intense life and potential. Enough to make or break entire civilizations, even.

So what happens, when the most inane of statements, questions, or exclamations, makes us bang our heads on the Wall of Webster? And, I don’t know, it might help if it’s funny.

For example, my boyfriend loves to skateboard. Especially under signs forbidding such. He told me of such a sign, NO SKATEBOARDING, next to which was another sign. (He is 29, so he doesn’t even get the youth excuse on this one)

Him: The sign said, PROSECUTORS WILL BE VIOLATED. So then I… (I cut him off)
Me: What did the sign say?!?
Him: Prosecutors Will Be Violated. But then I got my board and…
Me: Do you mean, “Violators will be prosecuted?”
Him: Oh… yeah. What did I say?

Oh those poor prosecutors. I love the bf! Another example is when he thought the opposite of Asexual was B-sexual. It makes sense, when you think about it. :smiley:

Share your language hilarities! I can’t be the only one. If your mix-up is in another language, it’d be cool (icy cold) if you could translate. Thanks!

2

I know it’s becoming commonplace, but Pres. Bush said recently to a reporter gaggle (regarding reports of abuse of the Koran in Gitmo): “People who say that are disassembling. . .that means they’re lying.”

3

Yeah, I saw that on the Daily Show and chuckled, Chefguy. The best part of that was, I immediately knew what he said was wrong. Then when he said, “That means they’re lying,” I said to myself “No it doesn’t.” :rolleyes:

It IS pretty commonplace though, and thats kind of scary.

4

I told family members recently that my husband had hung a Care Bears pieta in the garage for our granddaughter’s birthday party.

A pieta…you know, those things filled with candy that you hit until they break.

5

I am totally picturing Grumpy Bear and Tenderheart Bear as the figures in this scene.

6

Now for my great language moment.

My family was eating at a fine Mexican restaurant before going to see the latest Star Wars flick when the conversation turned to my oldest son’s two best friends (who happen to be twins). I questioned him as to whether they were identical or fraternal, and the talk then migrated to the differneces between the two types. As best I could, in response to a child’s question, I tried to explain the whole two eggs fertilzed vs. one egg splitting, when upon the mention of the word “zygote” my middle son snaps back from his own world into ours.

Middle Child (age 11): “Zygote?”…“What’s a zygote?”

Me: “Well, son, it’s a…”

Middle Child: “'Cause it sounds like a giant evil goat”…“From the Greek times (sic)”…“AAaahhhhh, it’s the zygote! Run!!!”

I almost shot soda out of my nose.

7

And through whom, by their breaking, all the world is saved from sin.

Unfortunatly on Judgement Day you have to give the candy back.

8

I babysit for a friend, a LOT these days. Her middle child, a five year old boy, has taken a stand in preference of nudity. We’re working on this. He’s also very interested in his penis - which is fine and completely understandable, but I’m the one who gets stuck saying “Sonny Boy, are you by yourself?” (“Nooooo.”) “Then you don’t get to be touching your penis. Okay?” (“Oooookay.”)

So one evening, all has gone well. The three year old and seven year old girls are playing happily. Sonny Boy is curled up with me in the big comfy chair, and I’m reading him a book. Friend and Friend Husband are two hours late getting back. I realize this is normal for them - they never get time to run out without the kids, so they were taking full advantage of it. However, I was getting a little worried.

“Sonny Boy,” says I, “where are your parents?”

Sonny Boy, in all seriousness, clapped his hands over his best friend and announced, “It’s right HERE!”

Sheesh. I have to learn to enunciate.

9

The mental image of a bunch of ancient Greeks running away from a zygote amuses me greatly.

Some of the kids in my mom’s seventh grade class don’t know what a hoe (the gardening/farming tool) is. So they get quite confused when someone says, for instance, “The farmer used his hoe to plant crops.”
Just imagine: “Go plants some crops, woman!”

10

I was talking about that metal thing you put coals in, you use it for a fire, you know, what’s it called? A brazier. Only I said brassiere.

11

HA! A Care Bears pieta and the mythical zygote. I love these stories! SparrowHawk, I did the brazier/brassiere thing too, when I was young. The Dairy Queen Brassiere! Yay!

I thought of another one… My sister was talking about her HS graduation (she had graduated a year or two before this), the cap specifically. “You know that hangy thing on the top, the talion?” She continued talking about the talion, until I realized she was talking about the tassel. Wha?

A few years later, I was watching Family Guy. Lois was giving Brian a new collar to wear to the pet show, and she said “Do you like it, its a talion!” At first I thought maybe my sister was halfway right about something, until (a few more years later) I figured out that Lois was saying “Its Italian.” :smack:

I still bring up the “Talion Incident” to her when i’m feeling evil.

12

Ah, a talion. Yet another thing that I must create. I have no idea what it will do, if anything at all, but it will be a talion. In fact it will obviosly be a tallion, so much so that when you look at it you’ll say “that thing is called a talion.”

13

My mother will never let me forget the time we were driving through the UK countryside and I called out, “Hey! There’s a peasant, pruning himself”.

Hrmph. You’d think she’d be pleased that her 9 year old was taking such an interest in ornithology to be noticing, of course, pheasants preening themselves. Still laughs herself silly on a regular basis.

14

Okay.
Back a lonnnnng time ago, when I was in seventh grade, twenty years ago, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons.

There was a spell that that said the character must “stoke a brass brazier”.

I read it as “Stroke a brass brassiere.”
Cool! “Eleusis” get’s to grab wonder woman’s titty!

No, you have to start a fire, dummy.

15

In Spanish, there are all these words which, according to the Dictionary of the Academies, mean to “pull”, “take” or “get”.

That’s definition number 1.

Then you get definition number something else, which indicates that in some part of the globe or other, that verb means something which your grandmother would not want you to know about (even though she did it with your grandfather at least once).

Now get together a team formed by people from Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia, and they have to spend a lot of time talking about how data in the new computer program is all linked, so that now when you tell the computer you want to work with Product 1234, it pulls all the related data. The first result is some giggles, followed closely by howls of laughter, one guy falling off his chair, etc.

One young, innocent guy proposed forbidding completely any word with a sexual meaning, but like I told him, that would make us unable to talk about food. No more “meat” or “fish” (being a straight female, I’m interested in meat, whereas my also-straight bros are interested in fish), no more talking about “bollos” or “omelettes” (references to lesbianism), not to mention “oysters”, “snails”, “crabs”, “peanuts”, “green beans”, “eggs”… we spent something like 15 minutes going through a list of foodnames with sexual connotations.

After some meditation and much laughter, we were able to settle on “jalar” as a word meaning “to pull” which didn’t make any team-member fall off his chair. We also decided to go on talking about food normally - can I have some egg sandwich, please?

16

I’ve related this one before, but it bears repeating:

I was in Guatemala with a construction team; we were all staying at the same motel in Guatemala City, and most of the guys didn’t speak Spanish. We usually took our meals in the hotel restaurant.

I walked in one day and one of the team members was sitting at a table with his food, which consisted of his main course and three plates of French fries. “Jimmy, what’s with all the fries?”, I queried. “Ah, man, I keep telling her I want some mashed potatoes, and she keeps bringing me these goddamn fries.”

“Well, that seems odd,” says I. “Hell, I’ll try again,” says Jimmy, and calls over the waitress. He points at the potatoes and nearly shouts “MASHED!” at her.

“Mas?” (more?) asks the waitress, incredulously.

“Si!”, exclaims Jimmy, “Now watch,” he says to me, “she’s going to bring me more fuckin’ French fries.”

I about fell out of my chair.

17

Once, when I was very young, my aunt and I were discussing the local old drive-in theater, and how it was being bought out for new housing (drive-ins are prime real estate, apparently).

“They’re going to build condoms there!” I told my aunt, in all my tiny wisdom.

“They’re going to build what?!” snorted my aunt.

“Condoms,” I replied. “You know, those smaller houses with no yard that people live in all bunched up.”

“You mean condominiums?”

“Yeah!”

“Those are called condos, dear. Try not to say ‘condom’ in front of people, m’kay?”

I don’t know how my aunt didn’t drive off the road from laughing so hard. And it took me another 6 years to find out what a condom was!

18

[Warning: Potentially offensive racial slurs ahead]

So, I’m in Grade 6, and I’ve just been given a news-collecting assignment. I have a group of countries from where I have to find news articles. One of these countries is Niger. I, being a little boy with an English-teacher mom, thought it would be great to make that a hard “g.” Mom :eek:'d and told me never to say it again. Of course, she didn’t tell me why I shouldn’t, so I didn’t stop. I didn’t figure out why she thought it was so horrible until about five years later.

19

I about fell out of my chair. wipes eyes Oh, the funny…

Man, Doping at work is really risky business. The CEO gave me a really weird look just now.

20

This reminded me of a piece of dialogue in RotK that didn’t make it from the printed page into the film:

Eowyn, having given up Aragorn for lost, settles for Faramir instead, and when all the happy stuff is going on Eomer announces the trothplighting in front of the guests assembled for Theoden’s funeral. Whereupon Aragorn toasts the happy couple with these words:

“No niggard are you, Eomer, thus to give to Gondor the fairest thing in your realm.”

(Yes, I know it’s a Norse word. Even so.)