He’s a partner in the firm of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.
How dare they!
I take it you’re unfamiliar with Saturday Night Live’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches?
(Here’s the transcript of the “penis mightier” episode. The sketch itself may be available on hulu or nbc.com.)
Not much of one for the ladies, are ye, Trebek?
That one made my pan ache.
Will I Am.
Rats, got to the second page before someone posted this one. I discovered this at an age young enough to think it the funniest thing ever.
Reminds me of an anecdote about how someone had a bumper sticker that said “GODISNOWHERE” and religious people whined and complained because they read it as “god is nowhere” (and because they’re whiny jackasses) rather than “god is now here”. The implication was that it was like a freudian slip of the mind, showing that religious people deep down inside don’t really believe there’s a god. No idea if this ever actually happened, could be as made up as religion is. But the “is now here” / “is nowhere” part is similar to what the OP is talking about.
I see “God I snow here.”
This also exists in other languages. Japanese uses three different types of writing all combined together: two syllabaries (kind of like alphabets) plus kanji, which are the characters borrowed from Chinese. One day, to make a point about how using kanji reduces ambiguity in written Japanese, my teacher gave the example of a sign with the following words, written entirely in hirigana (a syllabary):
ここではきものをぬいで ください。
It can be parsed either as:
Koko de hakimono o nuide kudasai.
Please remove your shoes here.
or
Koko de wa kimono o nuide kudasai.
Please remove your clothes here.
See also: bullpen island.
Similarly tangentially, I used to think the expression was “that says maybe” until I had a friend with a tendency to clearly enunciate it as “that’s as may be.”
Here’s a collection of every single Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch, in chronological order by air date.
Many thanks for the link.
Thanks.
acetone ace tone
action act ion
This one’s not quite as interesting, but I’ve never quite noticed that “unionized” can be parsed in two ways until I read an article that mentioned “unionized ammonia,” and my brain was parsing it as “union-ized” instead of “un-ionized.”
There’s also periodic acid.
The Marist Red Foxes website is www.goredfoxes.com. Presumably Go Red Foxes, and not Gored Foxes, which sounds pretty gross.
Finished watching all the SNL celebrity Jeopardies. I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, but he is PERFECT for that skit.
They were one thing that stayed consistently funny, even when the rest of SNL wasn’t.
Carnation: car nation
Fellatio: Fell at I, O!
We used to have another poster 'round here: Nosmo King. Presumably he didn’t like being told that smoking wasn’t allowed in a specific area. Every time I see a “No Smoking” sign, I think of him.
Haven’t seen him in yonks.