In my case, it happened a couple months ago at a bookstore (Chapters). A couple guys in their mid-20’s were on the other side of the shelf, with 1 guy apparently looking for a specific book. His buddy asked him with disgust “How come you want to get a book? Then you have to go to all the work of sitting down and taking time to read it! If the book’s any good, you could just wait and eventually they’ll make a movie of it you can watch.” The other guy didn’t reply.
I wasn’t there, but this happened to a good friend and definitely ranks as the dumbest thing I ever heard by proxy.
My friend Dave was in the American south, I forget precisely where, as the guest of a big oil tycoon. This JR Ewing type was showing Dave around his big ol’ house, in which he had a trophy room the walls of which where covered with the heads of the many animals he’d killed.
JR pointed in particular to the head of some kind of wild cat and said, clearly bursting with pride, :
“They thought those things were extinct around here, until I shot that one!”
The two people in front of me at the grocery store arguing over which part of Louisianna that Moulin Rouge is in. I didn’t have the heart to tell them they were off by a continent.
::sputter!::
Don’t get me wrong…I dearly love my Mother-in-Law. But she’s sometimes a bit …flighty.
Whilst showing a friend around her dining room, she was heard to say…
“Everything in here is French… except for what isn’t.”
<blink blink>
During a discussion in my AP European History toward the end of the year, we were discussing Vietnam. My teacher asked us what the name of the secret area used to smuggle goods was called. “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” I figured. The girl who sits behind me and one row to the right pipes up before anyone else can answer, “Wasn’t that the Bay of Pigs?”
I just shook my head in shame.
I still hold this one dear to my heart. It was right after Princess Diana died, and I heard a real old-fashioned Ralph Kramden-type bus driver talking about it to a passenger: “Ya know who dey should arrest? Dem Pavarottis what was chasin’ her on dem motorcycles!”
The mental image was priceless . . .
“If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year at college.”
Well, someone had to do it. 
One of the men in the cubicle next to mine is a fountain of idiocy. I manage to block most of it out, but one day, he was going on and on about the “Winston-Salem Witch Trials”. He’s a great on for having opinions on topics about which he knows nothing…
From one homeless guy to another in San Francisco discussing street crossing strategy: “You see, I wait until the light turns green, that way it’s safer.” I can’t believe that this guy is homeless when he can create a strategy like that.
Not overheard, but from my high school soccer coach: “Congratulations, guys! We haven’t beat Monroe since the last time we beat them.”
I’m probably going to have to come back to this thread, as more things occur to me.
My dad once told a Washington D.C. cab driver that, yeah, it was hot in Texas, but it wasn’t the heat, it was the humility.
My mom is prone to misuse words. This anecdote requires background. Mike is my dad and the grandma in question is his mother. Her maiden name was Ognosky, and I’ve always been told she was German. She was raised in Texas but does have a slight accent.
I overheard my mom say to her sister,“Of course, Mike’s mother has a brogue.”
No one likes a know-it-all, but I have to step in here. My language-loving soul can’t tolerate this.
“Uh, Mom,” I say. “I don’t think Grandma has a brogue.”
“She has an accent,” my mom said.
She has an accent," I said. “But a brogue usually means an Irish accent. Kind of like people describe a Scottish accent as a burr.”
A slight pause. “So it’s a German brogue.”
I’ve never laughed so long before. Thanks to this, the phrase “Auf Weidersien, boyo” always comes to mind.
During the '72 Olympics, I heard someone say in all seriousness, “If I could swim like Mark Spitz, I could win seven gold medals too.”
“D’ya think this is a natural lake?”
–My mom, at an observation point looking down at the top of the 150-foot-tall Lake Greeson Narrows dam on the Little Missouri River in Arkansas. :sigh:
In high school, my best friend was telling me one evening that he saw a pool truck filling up at a fire hydrant. He expressed suprise “I didn’t know those tankers could fill up at hydrants.” His little brother (prolly 13 or so at the time) piped up: “Maybe it was filling up the hydrant.” Hilarity ensued.
Overheard by me in See’s Candy:
“Oh my God…they have mincemeat candy? Who would want to eat candy with meat in it?”
:eek:
My mother has this charming habit of confusing words that sound alike. About two years ago, two girls hiking in the mountains around my town disappeared. My mother was reading a newspaper article about it and said, “If that was Kristen missing in those mountains, I couldn’t handle it. They’d have to seduce me.”
She meant sedate, obviously, but it would be funnier if being seduced could take her mind off her missing daughter.
As for things I’ve overheard, I was sitting next to these two girls on a bus once, in May, and one of them asked what the other was doing that night. She repsonded, “I’m going out to dinner with my friend Holly. Today’s her birthday.” The other one says, “Oh–what a cute name. Was she born on Christmas?”
About ten years ago while visiting my brother, we arrived as he was carrying in a few bags of bachelor type groceries, not much just essentials. His girlfriend at that time arrived shortly after and noticed that the toilet tissue he had puchased was a recyled product. She said, (I kid you not!) Ewwwwww, how do they get the poop off!" <blink, blink> :eek: It was a good ten minutes or so before anyone recovered enough to explain. The entire time she stood there saying, “What’d I say? I don’t get it what’s so funny?” Even after he explained that used toilet tissue was not recycled into fresh tissue, she still didn’t get what was so funny about her question. Poor girl.
Still chuckling,
Abby
Once, in ninth grade(Freshman, thought it is JHS here) a group of classmates were waiting for a class to start out in the hall. The school has open halls, and one girl was looking to the sky. She turns around and says “The clouds move.” She said it with the enthusiasm a 3 year old says it when they first notice that. Only, she was a ninth grader going to a hard-to-get-into secondary school.
PD. She also said “I wish the sun burns”
In high school in choir we were all discussing food one day (as I recall, the teacher was out of the room at the time). This chick named Bethany Ditzel (if ever there were a more appropriate last name, I have not seen it) pipes up, “I love food. I could practically live on food.”
The entire class fell silent.
“What?”
“You sorta’…do.”
“Huh?”
“You do live on food. You’d die without it.”
“I’m just saying I love it so much I could practically live on it!”
“But you DO!”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Overheard from someone seated behind me on an airplane: “You know, aircraft design used to be very archaic.”
When I heard this, I imagined engineers at the Skunkworks in the 40s saying things like, “Wow, our method of using slide rules and drafting tables to design aircraft sure is archaic. It’ll be much more modern 50 years from now when we’re using scientific calculators, CAD packages, and finite element software.” This ranks up with Gilbert Gottfried’s joke, “Back in the 1400s, people were walking around saying, ‘Boy, this sure is a long time ago.’”