I remember the first time I saw the old “dihydrogen monoxide” joke. It was brilliant! It was nerdy, it capitalized out the ignorance of others, it was clever, and it made a good point about the fear of science. Oh, how I laughed.
However, that was in the early damned 90s - over TWENTY YEARS AGO! And yet I STILL regularly see it trotted out at least monthly here. The moldering corpse is dragged out of its coffin and paraded around yet again for all to see, with an invariably smug air of “Oh, look how clever I am for using THIS witty nugget of gem yet again!” No, I’m not going to post a link. It’s been done so often for so long it would be unfair to single out any one particular person. But, and this is the point:
LET. IT. DIE.
Trust me, by this point, any human being on the planet - or at the very least, on these boards - who is smart enough to understand the joke has already SEEN the joke! No one is still impressed by it.
It’s like fingernails on the chalkboard to me. Feel free to contribute your own pet peeves, from this board or elsewhere. I just had to get that off my chest.
I’ve never seen the joke the OP refers to, nor do I have any idea what it means. After you have finished pointing and laughing at me, could you explain it so that I may know what it is that I must never repeat?
The sequel that you hate to the film you love DOES exist. That oh so witty “Highlander…2?” see what I did there bullshit is not clever and just annoying.
Dihydrogen monoxide= H[sub]2[/sub]O. Some people still think it’s clever to talk about this eeeevil chemical and list some side effects that also apply to water.
Basically, someone goes around trotting out the dangers of “dihydrogen monoxide” - people have drowned in it, too much of it can cause brain swelling, seizures and death; it causes X number of deaths annually, and before long, the naive and frightened public wants this dangerous-sounding compound to have warning labels or be restricted.
The joke, of course, is that “dihydrogen monoxide” is water; H2O. The joke is pointing out the naivete and ignorance of the general public.
“Mexican food gives you diarrhea”. No, it doesn’t - and I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a joke about how Mexicans are dirty, or a joke about how Americans have weak digestion, but it’s just not funny either way.