I can’t think of any of my own offhand (because I never make mistakes like that…yeah, that’s it!), so I’ll share one from a grad school buddy:
He was a second-year Ph.D. student in Russian History. One night we were all hanging out and sharing stupid moments we’d had while sleep-deprived at the end of the semester crunch time. He had been writing a long seminar paper on corporal punishment in the Russian Imperial Army, and actually wrote the following sentence (although luckily he caught himself before he turned in the paper):
“Corporals could pummel their privates with impunity.”
I was serving as the recording secretary for the Board of Zoning Appeals and we had a case involving a strip club. The owners were required to install landscaping, and they installed huge photinia to screen a rear parking lot. The BZA members had a discussion about the landscaping and I condensed it down to:
“In the case of the Gold City Dance Club, the Board discussed the size of the owner’s bush.”
Back when I was in school, there was a set of national exams taken in Ireland called the Intermediate Certificate. You sit these exams when you are 15 or so.
No one ever called these exams by their full title, and they were generally known as the “Inter”
Cue one nun writing on the blackboard
“Things to think about while preparing for the Inter course”
If you ever meet anyone about my age who went to school in Mean Scoile Mhuire in Longford, they’ll confirm it.
Of course, that self same Sr Elizabeth also taught Leaving Cert biology and instructed us to point out various bones in the skeleton on our own bodies.
I am sure the sight of 25 seventeen year old girls pointing out their own pubic bone when Father Cadam walked into the lab has stayed with him to this day.
If you are a scientist or mathematician, you are probably familiar with TeX, a typesetting language that is used to write papers for scholarly journals, books, etc. That ‘X’ is actually supposed to be a Greek letter chi, so it’s pronounced tech, not tex.
TeX is most commonly used in the form of a more user-friendly typesetting system called LaTeX. (You see where this is going already, don’t you?) Those In The Know don’t even bother with the pun, because it’s pronounced and “spelled” differently, with the idiosyncratic capitalization, so anyone familiar with LaTeX just reads it as latech and doesn’t even think about it.
So on a message board which is for Normal People, not science geeks, deep deep in finals week when my brain had already been wrung out like a sponge and I was making little progress on my term paper, I posted, “And, of course, I’m writing my paper in LaTeX because I’m such a masochist.”
It was one of those situations where you realize what you wrote as your finger is decending on the mouse button to click “submit,” and despite your brain screaming in panic at your hand, you hear the distant click anyway, and you know it’s too late.
I just cringed and waited for the jokes at my expense to start rolling in, but the actual result was, unfortunately, more of a stunned vitual silence. I hate to think of the mental images that formed in their heads . . .
My in-laws dragged us to their church for a Christmas celebration one year. They had a program called the Secret Sisters that was simply a secret santa program for the ladies. The church bulletin posted an announcement that after the services, the Secret Sisters would expose themselves to each other…
OK, just for you, you can discuss embarrassing things you’ve done with your mouth…
(OK, really it’s not just for you. I’m opening up the competition to everybody, although I think this will easily quadruple the thread length. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.)
I’ve recently come across the realization that anything–ansolutely anything–can be made sexual when two rules are followed:
(1) The proper tone of voice must be used, and
(2) It must follow the construction “verbing the adjective noun.”
Take any verb, any adjective, and any noun and plug them into the above sentence. Say it out loud with a slightly leering emphasis (y’all know what I mean) and voila! It’s sexual.
Heck, even “they were verbing the adjective noun” sounds lewd when said correctly.
Verbal? I spent the night on a friend’s loveseat, with a taller friend sleeping on their couch. In the morning, he complained of a stiff neck from lying with it propped up on the armrest all night.
“My neck’s fine,” I said. “I slept with my head down and my feet up.”
I still hear that line parroted back to me all the time. I need to have it put on some sort of crest as my motto.
Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
Panda mating fails; veterinarian takes over
Include your children when baking cookies
Safety expert says school bus passengers should be belted
Ok funny story…
I was fake wrestling with one of my friends… we were around a group of people but no one was really paying attention…
and then he gave me a knee to the stomache that actually connected and hurt…
So I started calling him names…
Me “what the hell you asshole.”
him “what?”
Me getting louder “you kicked me”
him even louder “no I didn’t”
Me even louder “Yes you did… you just kicked me”
him even louder" I did not kick you"
me “Yes you just did” …people start to turn their heads towards us as…
him “NO… I KNEED(NEED) YOU!!!”
Everyone started laughing at us… I laughed for about a half hour straight…
My most embarrassing double entendre was spoken. I was at a very good friend’s birthday party. She had recently come out, and the party was mostly her lesbian friends, who I had never met before that evening. We’re playing Taboo, and I have to get my team to say “birthday cake”, without using any words like “candles”, “party”, etc. Now, a normal person might have noticed that we’re at a birthday party, and gone from there. Not me. For some reason, the first thing I thought of was the fact that babies are always given cakes on their first birthdays, and they always just destroy them.
So I said: “the first time you had one of these, you probably jammed your fist into it”
Completely pandemonium ensued. After a few minutes, everyone stopped laughing, at which point it was disclosed what I was actually trying to get people to say. Pandemonium ensued again. That aside, it was an incredibly fun party. I was strangely pleased to have gotten such a laugh, even if it was completely at my expense.
