[QUOTE=Nava]
If I ever win the lottery I may try to get a PhD in Comparative Theology, just so I can write a thesis called “Fundamentalis Bullshit In The Three Religions Of The Book.” I’d probably have to change BS to a more PC word, though, pity.
[/QUOTE]
It’s been done. (Highly recommended, by the way.)
[QUOTE=LifeOnWry]
Your Grandma is FORTY-SEVEN??
Shit. My husband is going to be 47 next week.
[/QUOTE]
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:
[QUOTE=Scribble]
What’s worse is that the management didn’t understand why I was upset when I called to complain. “Well,” they said, “The store is open 24 hours,” I was told. “Just not all the time.”
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=JKellyMap]
What most of us learned in grade school as “long” and “short” vowels are really just pairs of phonemes that have been picked out for some reason (at random?) from the list of English vowel sounds. There’s nothing special about the vowel in “mate” (it’s really two vowels!) and the vowel in “mat”; there is, for example, another vowel sound commonly spelled “a” in English – the “a” in “father”. I’m sure there’s some historical reason why some of these have been at times labeled “long” or “short”, but technically they’re nothing of the kind. They’re just different phonemes.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Selkie]
Him: “No one is really an atheist, even if they say they are. I know.”
Me: “…”
Him: “I was an oncologist for xx years, and every time I told someone they had cancer, you better believe they started praying to God.”
Me: “My atheist grandmother died of lung cancer, while my mom and I cared for her at home, and she never once prayed or asked for divine intervention. Nor did my atheist uncle who died of a nasty lingering illness.”
At least he then had the good grace to shut up, although I could tell he remained unconvinced.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
It’s been done. (Highly recommended, by the way.)
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=liberty3701]
I knew this guy who truly believed that the Nazi’s genetically engineered la chupacabra. I think he might have read it in the Weekly World News or something similar, but he seriously thought it was gospel. All I could say was, “Why would they do that?” He didn’t know.
[/QUOTE]
Well, if it’s in the Weekly World News, that’s good enough for me!
(I love that rag. Hours of entertainment in it.)
[QUOTE=phil417]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=featherlou]
(I love that rag. Hours of entertainment in it.)
[/QUOTE]
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.”
[QUOTE=mrklutz]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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!
[QUOTE=featherlou]
Well, if it’s in the Weekly World News, that’s good enough for me!
(I love that rag. Hours of entertainment in it.)
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=featherlou]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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…
