“So the rules thus far are ‘don’t be late’ and ‘don’t be absent from class,’ unless you are absent because of circumstances outside your control. In that case, notify me before class. If I walk in here and you are not in your seat, and I don’t already know why that is the case… I will assume that you are dead. We will hold a brief service in your memory and then continue on, as we know you would want.”
“Yeah I mean if you don’t know the answer that’s fine, but I’m gonna make you pick the next person I call on. It’s a social experiment I run. I like to see if people pick their friends or their enemies. Wildly amusing. Anyway, be prepared for that.”
“So as the plaintiff’s counsel, you review all the possible venues and pick the one that’s the fairest to everyone….. haaaaahahaha I’m just kidding. You rig the court in your favor as much as you possibly can.”
“You’re supposed to go to a basement during a tornado. Why don’t y’all have basements?” “Can’t watch from a basement” “You’re going to die”
“My own law professor once described admiralty jurisdiction as ‘shit that happens on boats’ so [writes ‘boat shit’ on the board]”
“So then Congress gave itself a raise and America shouted, ‘Give it back you evil bastards!!!’ so loudly that they did.”
“I will provide you with pizza. For beverages, you’re on your own, but please abide by Baylor policy. Which is that we can’t have FUN.”
“And WHAT do we find outside the cities????? C O W S”
“All the desks on the third floor are reserved for 3Ls in practice court. Since you’re dying like, 100% of the time, they kindly give you a place to die. Sometimes you can see the lost souls wandering past the balconies….”
[makes a list of twenty-four things that could go wrong] [writes TRUMP in all caps as number twenty-five]
Round two:
“You don’t want conservatives! You want someone that will redistribute a little wealth! Get some commies! But don’t ask for them out loud, or it won’t end well.”
“Occasionally someone will walk into your office and start with ‘well just as a matter of principle…’ and that right there? That’s when you pull out your extra-strength Advil, because it will be a long day.”
“You can walk into a restaurant and just say, ‘I want tea.’ Sweet is implied! If you don’t want it sweet, it’s ‘tea, hold the sugar,’ and I like that!”
“My biggest goal is to die in Texas. When Gabriel’s trumpet blows, I will be resurrected from Texas dirt… if at all. Depends on his standards.”
“And I say, ‘How much will you pay me?’ and they say ‘a shitload!’ And I say, ‘how much is a shitload?’ and what do you know? Our definitions match”
“So you see that it’s an unincorporated association, and your reaction to that should be ‘shit!’ That is absolutely the proper reaction. That’s a good reaction.”
“You know it’s not perjury if you cross your fingers, right?”
“I would definitely shank someone for pizza.”
“Right now you’re… you’re lawyer larvae. I have a sense for these things.”
“So obviously Congress sprang into action. Why are you laughing? Oh yeah, BECAUSE IT’S BEEN A QUARTER CENTURY”
Round three:
“And by that I mean CRAC, the acronym, not c-r-a-c-k as in crack. Although I was a defense attorney for a long time, so if you want to know how to make crack, we can cover that in a side session. It’s good information. Very interesting.”
“And then I file a complaint against my employer for discriminating against me as a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant. You know… [sarcastically] the historically discriminated against crew”
“Listen, I like money. It’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil. You can like it just fine.”
“With the well-pleaded complaint rule, we take a scalpel and we carve out the cause of action. We lift it out of the body, bleeding! It is BLEEDING in your hands! You hold it in front of your face and you ask it, ‘WHO CREATED YOU?’ [groaning] ‘A federal law.’ ‘THEN YOU ARE A FEDERAL CASE!’ If it’s a state case, you cast it, still-beating, aside. And stomp on it.”
[with deep respect] “You would make a really good anarchist”
“Beaumont? How’s your family doing?” “Pretty well. I mean, everything is underwater, but it’s fine.”
“Your argument is what? ‘You can’t make that much money because it isn’t fair?’ This is America. Fair doesn’t matter.”
“We need ONLY one more thing: someone rich to sue. Can she help us?? We don’t know… until she describes one word on the side of that truck…. ‘Walmart.’ CHA C H I N G (don’t say that part out loud)! What’s forty percent of thirty million?? TWELVE MILLION. Forty percent is the ONLY math I can do in my head, because that is PRIVATE JET MONEY, BABY! The ONLY POINT of being rich is to HAVE A PRIVATE JET, because THOSE THAT DO can MANIPULATE TIME. As you can see, I am passionate on this point.”
“See this is a tough question because legislators are supposed to make laws, but how would you know that? They haven’t done it in YEARS.”
“Listen I don’t condone murder-suicide, but like… I feel it.”
I recognize at least three of these as Counselor, so I assume you’re having a fun time in Civil Procedure. You probably also have Bates for contracts. And Practice Court isn’t that bad, I promise.
i didn’t even know this could help me. i’m going to shoot the autoimmune disorder out of me
Doctor: you have the flu
Me cocking my gun: like hell I do
Ok, so the message I’m getting from this is that the government should shoot everyone who gets sick 😐
I feel like that probably wasn’t what the person who made this wanted to say, but with Conservatives you can never know, can you? Regardless, they could prob use some remedial Writing/English classes.
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “’Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
These are all so great and every other reply on this post is great too xD can’t stop laughing
I love these!
When we (Austrians) were living in the US, my mom would sometimes mix up “snake” and “snack” (Kids, would you like a snake? *9 year-olds screaming*) as well as “razor” and “eraser” (i.e. very loudly offering to buy her prepubescent daughter a pack of razors at the store). Makes me wonder if she was just messing with me.
Also, a dear friend – an American living in France, speaking very fluent German – once forgot the German word for knife (Messer) and asked for a “Schneidlöffel” (cutting-spoon).
When we were in France we wanted to have dinner on a boat on the river but we weren’t sure if the boat was going to stay docked. My father finally managed to convey the question in the style of a small child playing trucks: “vrooooooom? o non?”
i was tutoring a korean high-schooler in english, and i was encouraging him to retell the plot of a k-drama episode he’d recently seen. apparently part of it took place in a women-only bath-house, which he rendered as “a lady-washing shop.”
Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from—things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it.
Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.
There’s more: because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color.
But, hey, at least it tastes good, right?
High five, America!
oh my god
bitch that’s the tubby custard machine
im crying
OMFG THIS POST FINALLY MADE IT TO MY DASHBOARD IM CRYING
“bitch that’s the tubby custard machine”
10,000 years from now on the dawn of a new civilization where we are all just brains in jars flying spaceships through the vast unknowable void, i will still be laughing my ass off at “bitch that’s the tubby custard machine”. this i vow.
just moving along like everyone else 