A couple from my siblings:
Brother-We were at dinner, waitress asks,“Soup or salad?” His reply,“Yes please!” (he thought she said “super salad”)
Sister-Talking about me,“He wasn’t born.” (I’m adopted) Dad laughs,“Yeah, he was hatched.”
Actually, I thought of one that fits the thread better. (Actually stupid rather than would have been better to keep my mouth shut.)
I was talking to a friend who said she had done research on methods for fighting a certain acne-causing bacterium, and that she finally found a vitamin that had a good level of success and now took the vitamin regularly. “So wait,” I asked, “You had to give yourself the bacterial infection all those other times and try the other treatments?”
(In fact she was using petri dishes, as any responsible scientist/sensible human being would.)
My ex had a lot of connections among the New York theater crowd. Once he took me to a party and introduced me to Stephen Sondheim. I thought I was being really cool by saying, “I’m not going to tell you what a huge fan of yours I am,” to which he replied with a deadpan expression, “Everybody says that they’re not going to say that.”
Okay, this is bad…
My wife is a large woman.
Once, she shook her head in a way that left her hair looking kind of crazy around her shoulders.
If I were not on my phone, I’d link to a photo, but her hair looked just like Meatloaf’s on the back cover of “Bat outof Hell.”
You can see where this is going.
I said that she looked just like Meat Loaf.
Ay yi yi.
Joe
her: “Does this outfit make my ass look fat?”
me: “No, your fat ass makes your ass look fat.”
me: “What? Come back!”
WHY do women even ask!
It was Christmas, and I was a little flustered. So flustered, in fact, that when I tried to refer to my husband by name, I couldn’t remember it. To make it worse, I apparently had to look at him and say “Wait, what’s your name?”
Was at work and talking with a female Indian customer. Indian coworker, and friend, comes up and says hi, they obviously know each other. So I ask, “Oh, is this your mom?” Didn’t even bother considering the fact that she looked about mid-30s and my friend was 23 at the time. Then you could just feel the awkwardness as everyone’s mind moved on to, “What, just because they’re both Indian you assume they’re from the same family?” Oy.
Two bad ones…
A really spectacularly unfortunate off-the-cuff “your mom” joke to a friend who had lost her mom to cancer when she was young. I knew that, but “your mom” jokes were in vogue among that peer group, and I just said it automatically without thinking. :smack:
In Cameroon, I had a lot of neighbor kids that would hang around my yard after school. I kept coloring books and toys, and generally it was a lot of fun- I learned a lot of local language from them, and I tried to do some informal teaching since a lot of them weren’t in school. But sometimes it would be hard to get them to leave when I needed some privacy. One mischievous ten year old, in particular, would sometimes refuse to leave, and she’d just laugh as I got angrier and angrier. She was a good kid and all, but she liked to push limits.
One day she was hanging around when I was preparing food for some co-workers I’d invited over. The kid just wouldn’t leave, and kept asking me for bits of food and swiping chunks of veggies I was chopping. Normally I shared pretty freely, since often the kids were genuinely hungry. But on that day I had a short temper, limited supplies to feed my guests with, and had just had enough of her. I turn around and tell her to go to her own house, where her own mom can cook her dinner.
She starts crying. She’s an orphan. I suddenly realize that’s why she seems so much poorer than the other neighborhood kids, and why she seems to work full time doing hard domestic work for neighbors at such a young age. I should have known this- in hindsight it was the obvious. I’ve never felt like such an ass.
I no longer say anything about mothers, ever.
A rather unfortunate comment that had racial implications.
My ex and I rarely used each others’ names. Most often, we used pet names: “bubbie,” “babe,” and so on. When we did use each other’s names, something important was at stake. So one day, when we were doing some home improvement project, and I could see that she was in danger, I yelled, “Look out, _____!” Unfortunately, I had a brain fart, and _____ was the name of a female friend that was similar to the name of my ex, but not quite. I heard about it in spades later.
It took me going through Diablo until the last one (so looking forward to the new release) to learn while lurking here that it had a plot.
Heh, just the other night I was out having a few drinks with friends. We get talking about crazy drivers license pics and my friend E pulled hers out. I took a look at it, then said, “Wow, now we know what you’d look like if you went butch.”
.
Silence…then luckily everyone laughed and she didn’t get (too) offended. But yeah, I need to think before I say something that I think’s funny. As usual, open mouth, insert foot…
went to Disney World and saw Cinderella’s Castle
“Wow, it’s so small! I thought… uh… never mind.”
“What?”
“I uh… I guess I thought it was big, like… I thought it was a… ah… a real castle”
it was just one of those things that I had formulated an idea of as a child and really just never thought about it enough to question it until I realized, as it came out of my mouth, that it was incredibly stupid.
When I was ten, it was a trend at my school to say “God how boring” to anything our friends said. Don’t ask me why - we were ten.
“Look everyone - I’ve got a new LED watch!”
- “God how boring.”
“I went to a theme park on Saturday!”
- “God how boring.”
One weekend I was taken to my grandparents’ church, and my mother introduced me to the senior Sunday School tutor, who told me that while the younger children went to Sunday School class during the service, she took the older children to a side room of the church, to point out and explain what was going on during the service, and make the experience fun.
I think you can see where this is going.
I have never seen my mother so mortified in my life. 
At my friend’s rehearsal dinner for her wedding, we were all sitting around and chatting and joking and laughing. I said something about, “Yeah, it’ll make you nuts,” or something like that - with her fiancé, the schizophrenic, sitting right there. Oops.
Years ago, I had a friend whose brother was named Richard. Richard could be a little annoying (and typically very drunk), and was known for basically saying a few phrases pretty often, one of which was “It’s all good!” In time, my friends and I developed the automatic response to that phrase - “Shut up, Richard”.
First week of university, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I are having dinner with a bunch of new friends in a whole new town (and province). The conversation is going well, and one guy says “It’s all good!”, to which my husband and I both reply “Shut up, Richard!”
Of course, the new friend’s name was Richard! :smack:
Luckily, he had noticed the rather automatic way we said it, but there were a few awkward moments as we mentally caught up to what had just happened and stopped laughing long enough to explain ourselves. He laughed like a loon when he heard the story, and everything ended well.
My FIL also got caught with the “soup or salad” or “super salad” situation once… in his defence, he’s francophone and was struggling a little to keep up in the restaurant in English!
I don’t recall any momentous boners at the time, but yesterday I said something fairly dense. Talking about the Japanese rock star Eikichi Yazawa, I said he was pretty old, like mid30s, when he made it big. One, it wasn’t true. More importantly, that’s the age of my girlfriend. Thank goodness the shouchu took the edge off that one!
I was standing in line at a Starbucks once and saw this woman whose makeup looked lovely. It was just really nicely done, played up her features, wasn’t overdone, etc.
“Excuse me, I just wanted to tell you that your makeup is lovely!” I gushed, thinking she’d be flattered. She stared back at me and it was at that moment I realized that I’d pretty much just told her she’d done an excellent job of hiding her natural ugliness. Sorry!
Upon meeting a woman whose last name is “Chen,” I unthinkingly blurted out, “Hey, if you were in Japan, the emcee at your wedding would be saying PUBIC HAIR every time he referred to your family! Baw haw haw–uh, sorry.”
Boring Japanese explanation hidden here.
The last name Chen is usually rendered as Chin in Japanese. At weddings, the bride and groom’s families are referred to in the plural, adding 家 (ke) onto their last names. This would become Chin-ke, or more likely pronounced as Chin-ge, which is a homonym of チン毛 (chin-ge), a slang for pubic hair."
<while I was 100% technophobe>
"Free porn on the 'net? Really?! :eek: "