There’s a t-shirt getting repeatedly advertised to me.
The slogan on the shirt reads: I love it when my wife hasn’t noticed I slammed the bus a few more inches. The design is the words I love and my wife are in big print and the rest is in very small print so from a distance it looks like the message is I love my wife. I get that part.
But I don’t understand what the overall message means when you read it. I’ve googled and all I can find is that slamming the bus means lowering the suspension on a VW van. Is that supposed to be something wives get annoyed by and husbands have to hide from them? Is that even something that’s done often enough to create a market for a t-shirt?
Or is there some other slang meaning for this phrase that I’m not aware of?
No idea whatsoever. Right now most of the hits go to a t-shirt from a firm called Redbubble, so it can’t be very widespread.
But playing with Google, I found earlier versions that said “slammed the bug” and “slammed the car.” I guess Redbubble found the variation that sold best and now sticks to it.
All the variants are VW-oriented. Some gearhead talk, I suppose, that went viral because it was so weird.
Redbubble is a print on demand website, so it might be a very niche market that the design was originally intended for. As for why you’re seeing the ads, who knows why the software algorithm spit out that particular design for you…
I think it falls under the category “Husband’s hobby he spends all weekend every weekend working on - thus neglecting wife, the kids, his other household responsibilities, etc. And for something really dumb (in the wife’s mind).”
There’s an old PJ O’Rourke joke about fat people having sex that involves bus horn noises and slamming together, but I can’t tell it without getting a warning, probably.
I have a thrift shop tee that says “Leave freely anywhere” with a bicycle graphic. Another says “Sol de Marino”. Nobody ever accused a Bangladeshi sweat shop of language mastery.
Our first night in Kyoto my kid and I snuck out and wandered the street markets. Even at midnight they were hawking t-shirts with random English phrases. I bought a couple of shirts that just listed things like:
HIPPOPOTAMUS
GIRAFFE
TOASTEROVEN
PEACEFUL
Oh, and they must have gotten a container ship full of extra shirts from some North Dakota screenprinter. Lots of “Ezra L. Koon Junior High • Field Hockey Semi-Final Champs • 1978 • GO CRUSADING CRICKETS!” (that one had student “art” of a tractor blocking the front doors of the school).
No, it’s not. As linked above, it’s an algorithmic fill-in-the blank shirt design targeting guys that are in to car modification, to the annoyance of their wives.
Thanks for this. I am just about to wet myself looking at the best examples. And now that I’ve said this, I’ll bet soon I’ll be recommended a T-shirt about me wetting myself.
I was thinking maybe it was a line from a song or movie that I was unfamiliar with but apparently not. (A couple of weeks ago, I was seeing ads for t-shirts that said “Thicc thighs save lives” which is from a song I had never heard of until I looked it up.)
It seems like this is one of those cases where a cigar is just a cigar.
