Hear hear. I once sent the appropriate snopes link to a co-worker who’d emailed the whole office requesting pull tabs. Her reply was basically, I know it’s not true, but I’m going to keep collecting them as if it was. :smack:
Latest I heard repeated as fact – the “origin” of the phrase graveyard shift. As I was at a dinner party with Long Time First Time, I turned to her and muttered “www.snopes.com” under my breath.
My mom’s variation on the “Female Shithead Lemonjello” theme is that she swears that when she was a schoolteacher, she saw a colleague’s old gradebook in which the name “PregNancy Brown” had been recorded for posterity and the amusement of generations of educators.
There’s an older version where a black woman names her daughter “Vagina” because she overheard doctors and nurses saying it and thought it sounded pretty.
Why grim? That is, after all, one of the only two ways that a marriage can end.
There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The war on drugs is going well.
Social reflex. That figure is usually touted in a negative light, hence the “grim” characterization.
You only use 10% of your brain.
Well, maybe that’s true for the people that KEEP FRICKING REPEATING THIS STUPID FACTOID TO ME.
Augh, there are so many I’m officially sick of hearing. I can’t think of the ones that annoy me the most right now, but some are the one about how Stanford University was started, the one about how toilets flush the other way in the southern hemisphere, and maybe glitter/the gynecologist visit?
I think the thing that annoys me the most about these things is the I-shall-continue-in-my-idiocy-reaction reported above about the pull tabs. I would say that 75% of the time when I have forwarded a Snopes link to someone, they have said something like “Well, I thought it wasn’t true, but you can’t be too careful,” or something equally asinine. Yes, you can be too careful, too stupid, and too ignorant.
I work with Children Services a lot. Almost every liason and caseworker that I’ve gotten into a conversation with about bad kid names (it comes up a lot) has told me that there’s a pair of twins named Orangejello and Lemonjello in our system.
I also hear Barack-Obama-Is-A-Muslim a lot from random rednecks.
In today’s political climate, a bunch of people have been forwarding me the usual lies. The “Obama won’t salute the flag” and “Obama is Muslim” are probably the two most common, and I’ve heard them a LOT. I do my best to debunk…
There was some urban legend about a guy named Hal and some sheep. I heard that one a lot.
The book Freakonomics dealt with most of the name ULs, including Lemonjello, Female, Shithead, and others. Fascinating book.
Are you actually still hearing this??? I heard it back when it was true (e.g., when “Chemical Ali” was wiping out thousands of Kurds with WMDs). I heard it a lot more after it wasn’t true anymore (e.g., during the Iraqi invasion). But even the most hardcore defenders dropped it years ago. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone claim there were WMDs in Iraq for at least four years.
“Female Shithead Lemonjello”?
I think I used to date her. Or someone who should have been her.
A duck uses only 10% of its quack.
I had to fire my secretary because of the wild girls in the Home Depot parking lot.
Lee Marvin and Fred Rogers were war heroes, and they were gay lovers.
George Soros is really Leonid Brezhnev, after plastic surgery.
Bill Gates gave a commencement speech saying the grads were all suckers, and he advised them to buy stock in sunscreen.
If you cook food covered with plastic wrap, your skin will cling to itself, and nobody knows why!
If you use fabric softener sheets, tiny Asian spiders will seal up the holes in your lint screen. They were developed in a program funded by George Soros and Theresa Heinz Kerry.
If you say “hello” to a teenager in a mall parking lot, he will kill you as a gang initiation.
Well, throughout the 1980s and into the early 90’s, the P&G Satanism story swung around about three freakin’ times, with about a 4-5 year gap between
each time. I first heard it around 1982-3, then again around '87, and then about '92, and I THINK it’s finally dead.
When POWs were repatriated to the US, and spoke publicly of their torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Fonda called them exaggerators, liars, hypocrites, and professional killers. I grant you she may not have used the term “babykiller,” but to my way of thinking, “professional killer” is not such a huge distance from “babykiller” as to sneer at the latter term as an utterly unsupported urban legend.
I agree that her actions have been exaggerated; at the same time, I would say that an honest retelling of the story is not so far off from the fantasy that it deserves inclusion as an example here.
Just IMHO.
Then there’s the one about Autolycus and a ladle.
And Sampiro and some relatives I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Oh wait. Those are true… 
Nope, I had someone telling me just this week that there were in fact WMD’s in Iraq. I tried to pin the story down but it just kept getting stupider.
The recent variation is that Syria is hiding them.
Via Email and few ignorant associates, I kept hearing the Obama is a Muslim UL. Thankfully his outspoken Christian Minister put an end to that one. 
Sampiro, I hate to break it to you, but I really did work with a Hispanic lady whose name was Femále. She said it had northing to do with confusion at a hospital as she was not born in the US. I have no clue if this was a popular Hispanic name, but I did know this one lady who had it. It came close to rhyming with tamale.
We also had a Dr. Tepper that sounded like Dr. Pepper over the paging system.
A Dr. Bohzous that always sounded like Dr. Bozo and an older black lady whose first name Alphanet. So this hospital had a good share of odd sounding or spelled names.
The Richard Gere and the gerbil UL still gets mentioned from time to time.
Jim
I used to get emailed the one about Tommy Hilfiger (or Liz Claiborne, or Versace, or whoever it was that week) going on Oprah and making racist comments (“I can’t stand for black people to wear my clothing label!”). Even before I snopesed it I remember thinking “If Tommy Hilfiger/Liz Claiborne/et al were all Grand Wizards in the KKK, they’re first and foremost business people who are not going to make inflammatory comments that will start an immediate boycott of their products” and couldn’t (and still can’t) figure out how people who weren’t blithering idiots believed that one.
The soda-tabs were such a constantly forwarded U.L. that a couple of places actually now really do collect them. There’s a Ronald McDonald House receptacle (from the McDonald’s Foundation itself) in the breakroom where I work.
Speaking of McDonalds, one of the first ULs I ever remember hearing was that Ray Kroc (CEO of McDonalds, owner of Anaheim Stadium, etc.) was an occultist who donated tens of millions of dollars to the Church of Satan. I believed it at the time as I heard it from my teacher (I was a kid and this was during the backwards-masking “Philadelphia Freedom” is really “Worship the horned one!” backwards craze). Many years later when his widow died and donated $225 million to NPR and $1 billion+ to the Salvation Army and millions more to public television and other causes (do you realize how many mountains and mountains of soda tabs that is?) it made me almost hope that she bought Ray’s soul an occasional weekend pass out of hell.
The one I hear most around here is that if a professor doesn’t show up for class on time, the amount of time you’re obligated to wait for them to show up is based on their level of education (wait five minutes for a grad student, ten for an assistant professor, fifteen for a full professor).