Easy. “That’s one of the creatures that didn’t survive the Great Flood.”
My 6th grade teacher: “B.C. means, 'Before Christ”, and A.D. means, 'After Died"
Everyone in the class was quick to correct him.
A grandmother to a little child at a zoo watching an arctic fox walking around among the bears: “When the bears are small they are white, but they turn brown when they grow up”.
My friends daughter was overheard
‘The Beatles were Paul McCartneys back up band before he got Wings’.
“The Red Sea, A.K.A. the Reed Sea, is also known as the Dead Sea because the reeds grow too close together for anything to swim between them.”
-My 8th grade history teacher
I was at the Cincinnati zoo walking around the primate building, when I stopped at display full of gibbons or spider monkeys or some other small jumpy/climby type monkey. A mother and her two sons were also at the cage watching them. After a moment, the mother said ‘Boys, these are hyenas.’ There was a plaque next to the cage identifying them. They were clearly monkeys. I stood there dumbfounded for a bit, and then had to leave the area so I could laugh. I felt so bad for those kids.
A few years ago, I went to the traveling King Tut exhibit as it was down in LA. This exhibit had many things, but it didn’t have the famous death mask or sarcophagus. What it did have, however, was a miniature version of the famed sarcophagus (a lil’ canopic coffin, as it were). While looking at this item, I hear another patron have the following exchange with their child:
:smack:
A couple I know from Montreal (but originally from Romania) were traveling in a northern Chicago suburb (Niles, I believe) when they came on the full-sized (I think) model of the leaning tower of Pisa. They got out of the car awestruck and finally one of them exclaimed, “Only in America!” A passer-by overheard this and said to them, “No, there’s one just like it in Italy”!
Nearly as dumb was this exchange that took place in Montreal’s Mirabel airport. My son seeing a Sabena flight, asked me what Sabena meant. Before I could hazard a guess (I think it is Societe Belgique National) a woman passing by and overhearing him turned and said, “It probably means airlines in [long pause, then finally] their language”!
Then I once saw the opening sentence of a paper by the late Roman Jacobson, a world-famous linguist, that states something like, “Most people think that the linguistic situation in Norway is rather like that of Belgium.” What could he have possibly meant by this?
This reminds me of a Simpsons episode, the one where Homer tries to be an inventor
Homer and Bart run up to Edison museum
Bart: “Alright, the museum’s still open!”
Man in line slaps his kid on the head
Man: “Why can’t YOU be that excited?”
A couple of years ago, at the Smithsonian’s American History museum, in the maritime section, there was a display of this image or one very similar to it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=ms-android-sprint-us&tbo=d&site=webhp&tbm=isch&source=hp&oq=MIDDLE+PASSAGE+&gs_l=mobile-gws-hp.12..0l5.1540.16247.0.17705.32.22.5.2.2.1.630.4127.0j1j5j2j2j2.12.0.les%3Behyp,a%3D1,b%3D1000,n%3D5,t%3D2,r%3D5..0.0...1ac.1.7B1ZEoj5vmo&q=MIDDLE%20PASSAGE&biw=533&bih=320&sei=iNAGUdr3NpG10QGnyICwAQ#i=9, with accompanying text about the middle passage. A middle-aged woman with a Pennsylvania accent tells her high school-aged daughter “They didn’t mistreat the slaves like that, they were too valuable”.
One guess: most people in Belgium speak either Dutch or French, and the Netherlands and France are also countries in their own right. Whereas they speak Norwegian in Norway, but it is mutually intellible with Swedish and Danish, so the sentence might mean that some people assume that they mainly speak Danish and Swedish in Norway? (just a wild guess)
From wikipedia:
I assume he was alluding to the analogous tensions between Dutch and French speakers in Belgium. I would quibble with his use of the term “most people,” though.
I thought it meant Societé Aeronautique Belguique National (or something similar), but when I looked it up I found it’s Societé Anonyme Belge d’Exploitation de la Navigation Aérienne.
As for Norway, keep in mind that Bokmål and Nynorsk aren’t two different languages like French and Dutch in Belgium. It’s just two different standards for written Norwegian.
No, sorry, SABENA stood (it’s defunct) for Such A Bad Experience, Never Again.