Most Ignorant Thing You've Ever Heard

It’s been done. (Highly recommended, by the way.)

Well, I’m a 47 year old grandmother myself… although my grandson is only 2… so wow, olives must be a young kid. Could have fooled me, she writes with more maturity and good sense than most so-called adults.

And I love what that pimento does for your outfit. Way to accessorize.

It’s probably not the most ignorant thing I’ve heard, but all the “dumb teacher remarks” inspired me: Back when I was going to Catholic school, one of the test questions was “Where was Jesus crucified?”

I wrote “Golgotha,” (having studied for this out of encyclopedias instead of the study material they handed out).

It was marked incorrect. The right answer was “Calvary.”

[StevenColbert] Yeah, you people with your book-learning may have the correct answer, but just because your answer is correct, doesn’t make it the right answer! Moving on…[/StevenColbert]

olives, I just read your explanation of your grandma. Anyway, you rock.

Long before the Chunnel was built, my sister wondered off-handedly about driving directly from London to Paris. :rolleyes:

I used to take my cleaning to a dry cleaner that advertised “One Hour Martinizing.”

One day I asked if I could have my shirts back in an hour. “No,” the woman said, “I wish people would stop asking me that.” It was said in a snotty tone, so I got pissed off.

“Then what the hell is the sign for?” I asked.

“What sign?”

“The sign that says you have One Hour Martinizing.”

“We have no such sign.”

So I led her outside to look up at the great big sign - bigger, in fact, than the name of the business - that said “ONE HOUR MARTINIZING” and then below that “Clothes Cleaned In One Hour!”

“So what’s that, then?” I asked.

“What is Martinizing?” she asked me.

They actually used to be long and short vowels, in terms of morae, in Old English. The same designation has been kept for Modern English, even though it isn’t a question of length any more.

Historically, the vowel in life was similar to the vowel in living, but took twice as long to say. Now they’re just different sounds, and actual length isn’t phonemic. The exception to this is the difference in vowels between nook and nuke. There they really are distinguished by phonemic length. (Well, to nitpick there is some difference in vowel quality as well as quantity.)

Historically, the reason why adding so-called “silent e” to the end of a word makes the preceding vowel long is because Old English liked long vowels in open syllables and short vowels in close syllables. Adding a final, pronounced -e to an Old English word opened the preceding syllable, making the vowel longer in duration. If the word ended in a consonant, the closed syllable made for a short vowel. In modern English the loss of final -e in pronunciation has closed a lot of syllables that used to be open, but the ones that originally had a “long” vowel have kept that designation. The great vowel shifts followed regular patterns, preserving the relationship of long-short vowel pairs, even after the loss of phonemic length.

Modern Hebrew and Modern Persian are two more languages like English in this regard: their writing systems still preserve the historical vowel lengths, but not the current pronunciation.

Kudos on your family. I always say that my gramps isn’t an “atheist” so much as an “antitheist” who prays there won’t be a God.

Back in '89 he was due for some surgery, one day Mom got there and Grandma was outside the room. When Mom asked what’s going on, Grandma said “oh baby this time your Da is really scared! He’s having confession!” The previous time Gramps had confession, as far as anybody in the family can tell, was when he was an altar boy, age nine.

I’m afraid it’s guys like him who give ground to people like that doctor.
Thanks for the link, Polycarp, I’ll make sure to read it.

These stupid remarks are taken from a holiday company’s web site :-

“No one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled…”

“My fiance and I booked a twin-bedded room and we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the rooms that we booked…”

“The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers, will we be OK staying here…?”

“It took us nine hours to fly to Jamaica from England - it only took the Americans three hours…”

“It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel…”

“I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller…”

“I was bitten by a mosquito - no one said they could bite…”

“We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white…”

“We had to queue outside with no air conditioning…”

…And finally, from a holidaymaker in Spain:

“There were too many Spanish people. The receptionist spoke Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners.”
I have also read of of companies in the UK who regularly receive queries from the US enclosing stamped, self addressed envelopes with US stamps on them.

Imagine my disappointment when the link didn’t go to a book titled “Battle God Karen Armstrong”. All these wonderful Tokyo-smashing images were for naught.

A conversation I had with my pregnant sister:

sis: I hope, hope, hope I have a girl.

me: why?

sis: so I can bond with her, you know how moms and daughters have a special bond with each other.

me: yes, but boys have their own special bonds with their moms too.

sis: (disgusted) what?? If I have a boy there’s no way I’m going to BOND with him!

me: huh?

sis: that would make him gay.
I was actually relieved that she miscarried.

Man, this is so wrong in so many ways.

Okay…first, my daughter’s first-born is a son. The relationship between a mom & son is of importance…how the mom treats the baby boy is, in the long run, how he expects to be treated how other women in his life. No matter what your sister says, when she holds her baby son, all other bets are off.

Second, I lost two kids to miscarriage. Your sister grieves. Don’t be stupid.

Well, if it’s in the Weekly World News, that’s good enough for me!

(I love that rag. Hours of entertainment in it.)

phil417, when we quote other people, we are required to assign the quote to the person who originally posted it.

Not all moms bond with their children, and not all women make good mothers. I would be very hesitant to tell someone I don’t know that I know his sister better than he does.

You don’t know the circumstances of his sister’s pregnancy and miscarriage. For all you know, she might have gotten pregnant by accident and was relieved by her miscarriage. Your experience in life is not everyone’s experience.

Like it says on its masthead, the Weekly World News is a humor publication, and a very good one at that. If you don’t believe me, just look at the bad puns in the Letters to the Editor column or Chuck Lee’s predictions from the future. (In all truth, its slogan- “The world’s only reliable newspaper”- reminds me very much of the Onion’s “America’s finest news source.”

Thanks for the laugh!

I’ve got a friend who perplexes me greatly. She’s quite intelligent, but doesn’t give herself credit for it, and as a result doesn’t think through things, including what comes out of her mouth.

She’ll say things like, “Black girls plan on having babies and then giving them to the grandmothers to raise - it’s just part of their culture,” or tell me how black people are the worst neighbors because they are used to living in the projects and having no respect for their property or their neighbors, and they spend all their money on having really fancy cars while their house deteriorates.

I cringe so hard I fold in half, and try to tell her while these may have been her observations of a certain subset of black folk she encountered at school (she went to a vastly majority black community college), spouting such things as generalities for anyone of the race make her sound like a grade-A racist. She always counters that she’s not a racist, she was even engaged to a black man!

K. in Men in Black insisted that’s where you can find the real news, after all.

I worked at a temp job where the mean IQ was around negative ten. A temp coworker would always complain about how stupid most people there were. One day he got the bright idea to just start whistling during a quiet working time, just after someone made a dumb comment. The song he decided to whistle was If I Only Had a Brain.

The girls in the office puzzled and puzzled over what the tune was. They finally figured it out: It was the theme to Gilligan’s Island.

This comes pretty close.

It’s the guy’s second post, I’m guessing he hasn’t learned to quote yet.

Absent any claim that the sister said she was relieved about the miscarriage, I’d go with the default assumption that she wasn’t - it was the poster who was going on about being relieved about the miscarriage, and, on the evidence available at the time, merely on the grounds that pregnant sis was an ignorant homophobe.

I think you’ve just discovered the Meaning of Liff…