im clever, me
Some witty comments i have heard-

"Its not tree's, its a wood"
"what, the pope of england? what about the pope of the world?"
"monkeys don't have thumbs" (when asked how they held banana's, spacker hands were enacted)
"NO, YOU FU*CKIN CRIPPLE, YOU CANT DO THAT" said when someone put the wrong card down in a game of poker at college. surrounded by paraplegics.
(cookie_freak, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:29, Reply)

Another one....
And this time it is my mum.
Me and my brother were watching some dinosaur programme and my mum walks in. I tell her that there is a programme on about dinosaurs that have been discovered on a remote island. She stood and watched for a bit before I pointed out that dinosaurs are extinct.
I'll let that one pass as she had probably been working hard that day.
(keify34, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:25, Reply)

Awww Bless
Working in Kwik Save when at 6th form.
Old woman comes up to me -
- "Do you have any of that semi-Skilled Milk ?"


Brightened up an otherwise dull afternoon.
( dogfish, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:23, Reply)

Stupid, stupid, stupid....
I used to work with a girl who thought that Euopre was in America. I wish I was taking the p*ss but I'm not. I then stuck post-it notes with phrases such as "The pope does not live in America", "Pasta was not invented in America" and so on and so on, all over her computer.
When she came back and saw them, she burst into tears. Oops!

Also...again, no lie.... a completely different girl I worked with thought that the United Kingdom wasn't in Europe. Oh the shame of knowing these people. To be fair to her, she did always laugh at herself because of her stupid moments. She did a lot of laughing.......
(keify34, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:17, Reply)

Yet another American-lacking-in-geography one...
My dad is a regular visitor to California, and being the home of the densest people on the face of the globe, he gets quite a few belting stories. My favourite is the time he went to Redondo Beach and was queueing for a hot dog with his mate (also Glaswegian but now naturalised American) when a bloke in a Hawaiian shirt rocks up to my dad, who has the broadest Glaswegian accent in the world...

Bloke - "Hey dude, are you Irish?"

Dad - "No, Scottish"

B - "Oh, your from England!"

D - "No, Scotland, they're two different countries"

B - "Yeah, whatever man. I'm Irish"

But it doeasn't end there...

D (who knows a fair bit of Ireland) - "Oh really? Where are you from?"

B (without skipping a beat) - "Santa Barbara"

D - "...... So where are your parents from?"

B - "San Diego"

D - "So you're not really Irish then?"

B - "But my name's MacDonald... So I'm Irish, OK...?"

D - *clenches fist, takes aim*
What a fanny. Apeloverage, don't be soft ya bawbag.
( Normanator Bad case of trapped wind since, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:16, Reply)

Here's one my mum won't forget
Mum (aged 10): Mum, where's the alimentary canal?
Gran: Between North and South America.
(knife_of_justice, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:08, Reply)

Oh yes, and another one...
I can't remember the exact words, but in the first year of my Engineering course at the country's top Engineering college, I recall an Engineering student trying to convince a lecturer that metal boats will sink because metal is heavier than water...
( dr_fonz, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 13:06, Reply)

Back at school...
4th year underling: What does ABBN stand for?
Me: Abbreviation.
4th year underling: Abbreviation for what?
Me: Duh!
4th year underling (get's the clue): Duh! sorry.
( mikeyyy, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:45, Reply)

Old Dear
Was working at the till in Littlewoods Cafe, and a flustered old dear came up with her reciept and pointed to something.
Her: "You've charged me for sausage and mash! I only had a pot of tea!"
Moi: "That says CHANGE and CASH"

-.-;
(Valensin, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:32, Reply)

dammit
apleloverage needs to make a post on the messageboard then I can ignore him....
(Super Oaf Petit filous?, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:32, Reply)

apleloverage
arf you said false anal, does that mean proper front bottom love.

stop it by the way, this is a topic about stupid people not for stupid people.

love
(BadgerPirate, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:16, Reply)

Silly little blond girl at school
When I was doing my GCSEs, there was a girl on my bus who was blonde and incredibly thick.

To give you an idea of how thick she is, she once tried to balance a full can of coke on one finger. Of course, coke everywhere.

That's not too bad for her standards.

When she heard about the Tsunami, she said, "Well all they had to do was hang onto a tree" and "They could've run away"

That's not the incredibly ignorant bit. This is:

She once decided that she was smarter than I was at maths. Logically, since I was 3 years above her.

I asked her to find the square root of -1. To all of those who are maths-impaired, there is no answer. There is no such thing as a square root of a negative number.

She didn't know. I tried to set it lower. What's a square root? She didn't know.

I told her that her IQ was outmatched by her shoesize.

She took off her shoe and checked.

I give up.
(DarkLite swallowed my entire undercarriage, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:15, Reply)

apleloverage
Your argument can be reframed as "I like to be covered in jam and spanked by Fern Brittan".

Because, you see, when we change words, we change the meaning of a statement.

I seem to recall being taught that this form of argument was the fallacy of argument by false analogy.

Anyway, re-reading your attack on the use of chav, you not only display your prejudice that you presume that by using the word chav that low income is implied, but then explicitly attempt to make an equivalence between the word "nigger" and "chav", which manages to be insulting to afro-caribbeans and those on low incomes, due to the previous equivalence of "chav" and low income that your previous statement implied.

I thus nominate your post for the most stupid thing I've read this week.

And yer mum.


_________________


Back to stupid people:

"Do you think the camera-man was high enough to survive?"
"How else do you think the footage got to the BBC website?"

"What they have to do is hold on."

"The water was going at 500 mile an hour. That's faster than a plane!"

Thankyou, my cow-irker, for clearing up the Tsunami for us. All one person. With a degree. She may reproduce in the future.
( Argh-wrath ... is a very lame Glorantha joke, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 12:02, Reply)

Geography
I shall call her Nicky Stovel, yes you guessed it...

We were in a pub one night talking about holidays, I mentioned that I had been to France many times and that it was really easy to get to by Ferry.

Her response was 'Yeah but you then have to travel all the way through Russia'

The conversation became quite heated between us as to the exact location of Russia relative to the UK and France.

I settled this by soliciting an opinion from a table of some 20 people, who all agreed the Russia was not between the UK and France.

Nicky never spoke to me again, which is a shame.

She had great norks.
(BadgerPirate, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:57, Reply)

Easy Son
Can you two ladies please knock off the sociology debate? This "definiton of chav" row am giving me a well bad headache innit
(le renard, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:56, Reply)

Apeloverage
I think you're missing an important distinction. Yes, insulting someone by calling someone gay (or nigger or whatever) does insult all the members of whatever group you're comparing your victim to. As - obviously - it's not true that any group of this sort is fundamentally stupid/evil/otherwise unfluffy, it's wrong to imply that they are by using the as an insult. I agree with the point of your post (if I understood correctly) that doing so is bigotry.

However, chav is a descriptive term meaning something like "someone who gets on the bus reeking of beer and hash, sits behind me, pokes me in the back of the head and asks me to 'Check ra nick! Dis yer ma still dress ye, ya pure brainboax?" while "wear[ing] bright white tracksuits and three kilos of gold jewellery". It's a description of someone's behaviour and personality which has nothing to do with how riches, race, orientation or anyother factors outside of their control. People don't dislike chavs becaude they're associated with an unfairly disliked group, or through blind prejudice. One can only gain the label of chav by being consistantly rude, often agressive and refusing to engage the (sometimes excellent) brains they're blessed with. Insulting someone because of prejudice is detestable. Insulting someone because of easily changed antisocial behaviour may be unpalatable, but it's not even in the same league.
/rant

Overheard stuff:

In the wing of Windsor castle that was gutted by fire there was (and possibly still is) a moleste display covering the walls of a room showing extensive pictures and information about the fire and the subsequent restoration work. When I went there, the only way to access a particularly impressive restored hall in this wing was by spending about ten minutes queueing along these eight-foot-high display boards with their moleste brightly coloured photos and headlines.

Inside the hall, an american tourist was proudly telling his family that he didn't reckon this was the original plasterwork, and that the tourist office's plan to decieve people by passing it off as antique was disgraceful.

This in turn reminded me of another (American again) tourist at Stonehenge, who reckoned that because we'd let the stones get so tatty we should take them down and put up new ones. We should build it better than last time because "it hasn't lasted well", and while we're at it she didn't think much of the pattern. That's us told, eh?

lenghth/girth etc...
(Not very much gravitas at all, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:42, Reply)

Apeloverage
I was heartened by your comments, perhaps you would like this website that I found especially for you:
www.iamthemostpcpersoneverandeveryoneelseiswrong.com
(StupidGlueBoy, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:36, Reply)

Are You Sure ?
First met a friend of a friend.....
Her - "I love your accent - are you from Manchester ?"
Me - "No, I'm from The North East"
Her - "Are you sure ?"


say no more
( dogfish, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:32, Reply)

broadband
A couple of years ago, i was in the PC World next to Whitechapel buying myself a shiny new lead, or summat routine like that. I'm in the queue, and this old bearded guy in front is talking to his mate about 'what a bargain this here "CD burner" is 2nd hand' at a handsome £80. I felt I should've really told him he was being raped somewhat on that price, but, like I said, the guy had a beard.

He was also clutching an external modem (new) so he could 'get on this crazy tinternet', for which he asked them as he's handing over his card, "Can i get BT Broadband with this?". The checkout girl looks at it, and I look at it. It's a bloody 56k dial-up modem for fuck's sake! She doesn't know of course, so she runs over into the "technical support" section of the shop; you know, the bit surrounded by a glass wall so people can see the geniuses inside hard at work 'fixing stuff and being technical'?

Of course I didn't hear what they actually said, but all I saw was one guy look at the box with a frown, talk to his colleague for a bit, then shrug his shoulders and say something back to the sales girl. She then walks back to our bearded friend and says "yeah, should work fine".

Ah, the cunt deserved it for having a beard.
( slippery doctore, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:05, Reply)

sea twunt
Used to work with an utter knob called Rob. Rob the knob. He had two leaving dos in the time I worked with him. At the first we made him cry and at his second we all went to a different pub whilst he was in the toilet... anyway...

Went to a restaurant with him and a group of ten or so colleagues. Someone orders sea bass.

When the dish is brought to the table, Rob issues the immortal, "ah, sea bass is a fish then!"
(Analyst, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 11:05, Reply)

I ain't fick innit
A friend of mine came up with the following -

"Isn't Kings Lynn in London?"

"Where do flies come from?"

"What's 'a quater of a million' in numbers?"

Did I forget to mention she's eighteen years old? Now when someone is being thick, we say they did "a Becki". Woops, there goes my attempt at keeping her identity a secret.

----------------------

Another friend of mine, who's in his twenties, did a Becki. It took me about half an hour to convince him that spiders have eight legs. The conversation kicked of thusly -

Me - But spiders aren't insects are they?
Him - What are you talking about?
Me - ... Spiders... they're arachnids, not insects.
Him - *blank stare*
Me - Spiders have eight legs...
Him - ... ... What?
Me - They have eight legs.
Him - ... Naaaaaah!

This went on for a while. However, because he wouldn't take my word for it, I resorted to getting a picture of one and made him count the legs with me. Even then he didn't look entirely convinced.

----------------------

Finally, not someone saying something stupid as such, but just being plain thick. I went to school with a girl, named Jane, who we managed to convince that Marmite was mined in Chesire. Dumb ginger cow.
(bunny_333, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 10:23, Reply)

More Americans!
(and Yes, we know they're not ALL like this)

To set the scene, I was in the Luxor Hotel (the big pyramid) in Las Vegas. The Lifts (Elevators for the Yanks) are basically boxes on wheels/rails which move up and down the sloping pyramid walls.

The doors of the lift i'm in open, two guys get in. I am then subjected to about five minutes of this fat American telling everyone in the lift how he 'doesn't get it' that a lift can move up a sloping wall?

As we stop at different floors, this statement is then repeated to every new person getting on the lift...

To prevent myself from having to punch him, I had to get out of the lift early and then take a different one to the ground floor.
:(
(SproutsAreEvil, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 9:52, Reply)

My brother
worked as a diving instructor in the carribean (spawny get). Anyhoo, a large proportion of his customers were american tourists on day trips from cruise liners. Some of these people fulfilled every stereotype of US tourists and then some.

My brother : "Be careful not to damage the coral reef, its actually a living animal"
Tourist : "So how do you know where to find it?"

Another one, standing on the beach looking at the water as it fades from azure down to deep blue : "Do they sell bottles of the different colours in the gift shop?"
(Daveybaby, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 9:09, Reply)

I was listening to an American MBA student....
...give a talk about the Borgia family (very important in Renaissance Italian politics/skullduggery) during a class. The main character was Giovanni Borgia however as the family were originally Spanish he is sometimes referred to as Juan Borgia (Juan is the Spanish equivalent of Giovanni). This MBA student got thoroughly confused and told us all about these two characters, Giovanni and Juan Borgia, who strangely enough lived completely parallel lives and exactly the same things happened to both of them. They even married the same woman and died the same way at the same time. He didn't notice his mistake and what is worse neither did his fellow classmates!?

And these people are future industry leaders?!
(Hazy, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 9:04, Reply)

wow.
i was out with some friends, a large group of us. sitting between two conversations, i overheard some girl talking to her friend:

girl 1:'i'm so depressed, i tried to kill myself last night- i took a bunch of pills.'

girl 2 (said with quite a serious, somber tone):'oh my gosh, did it work?'
(4amblue.com/chuck, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 8:57, Reply)

Gotta love dem aussie dudes...
Okay, they've been around for a while so the general populace isn't impressed any more, but I've not been here long...and it's not really ignorance but makes me snigger...
There's a shoe store a la JB called 'Athlete's Foot'. After the fungal infection. And, my favourite, a bedding store called 'Holy Sheet'.
The bus ad for Holy Sheet goes 'Looks like sheet...smells like sheet (wtf?)...tastes like sheet (either way it's WRONG)...
What conclusion are you supposed to draw? It is shit?
(spida, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 8:32, Reply)

A lady to a carpenter
"can you build an antique doorframe for my threshold?"
(Guso, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 6:16, Reply)

Too Dumb for the Army
As a US Army JAG (military lawyer) in the early 90's, I conducted hearings to kick people out of the service administratively, for misconduct or inadequate performance. One such case involved a guy who was in civilian jail for having robbed a convenience store (in America, these all have in-store monitoring cameras). The official reason for his elimination from the military was misconduct, but I also thought he should have been equally cited for performance/stupidity because he robbed the store dressed in his BDUs (Battle Dress Uniform), the official military camouflaged combat uniform, which always have "U.S. Army" and the person's last name stitched across the tops of the upper front pockets. It made him eary to find for the police.
(synozhowt, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 5:55, Reply)

This one happened in Venezuela
In a beauty pageant, a miss was asked about her favorite music. Trying to look cultured and well educated, she replied "clasical music, specially the one from Shakespeare".
Days later, she posted a public apologise saying that she confused Tchaikowski with Shakespeare. Now I can't say wich statement was stupider...
(Guso, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 5:23, Reply)

chavs
quote:

In reply to any claims that the word 'chav' (or 'ned' up here in Glasgow) only applies to 'poor' people, I would say that it's completely untrue. I wouldn't call someone a ned simply because they're not as well off as I am, a ned is someone who gets on the bus reeking of beer and hash, sits behind me, pokes me in the back of the head and asks me to 'Check ra nick! Dis yer ma still dress ye, ya pure brainboax?' or something similar. I've met plenty of neds whose families are perfectly well off and yet still choose to wear bright white tracksuits and three kilos of gold jewellery.

and my brilliant reposte:

OK, let's say you got mad at your friend and called him a 'stupid faggot'. Yet your friend is not gay, and you indiscriminately apply the term to hetero- and homosexuals alike. Does it follow that there is no cause for gay persons to take offense at your term?

No, it doesn't, because the important point isn't who you apply it to or how literally you mean it, the point is that you use 'being gay' as an insult.

So, to take it further, what if you apply the term 'faggot' to anyone who acts in a way you associate with being gay eg foppishly dressed weedy poetry-reading types, who may or may not be gay. You might say that a lot of these guys, maybe most, aren't gay. You might also say that you don't apply the term to 'straight-acting' gay people. So does it follow then that there is nothing homophobic about this use of the term? Again, no it doesn't - a particular way of acting associated with an unpopular group provokes the insult that they are in fact members of this group. The fact that they might not be doesn't change the fact that you think being gay, or 'acting gay', is worthy of insult, and an insult in itself. The most laddish badly-dressed gay man is still entitled to take offence.

Translating your comment above:

"I wouldn't call someone a nigger simply because they're not as white as I am, a nigger is someone who gets on the bus reeking of beer and hash, sits behind me, pokes me in the back of the head and asks me to 'Yo man, get da fock outta my face' or something similar. I've met plenty of niggers whose families are perfectly white and yet still choose to wear bright white tracksuits and three kilos of gold jewellery."
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Wed 12 Jan 2005, 5:20, Reply)