::: Star Weekend Magazine :::

Jokes

Linguist Jokes

Spelling bee
"I've just had the most awful time," said a boy to his friends. "First I got angina pectoris, then arteriosclerosis. Just as I was recovering, I got psoriasis. They gave me hypodermics, and to top it all, tonsillitis was followed by appendectomy."
"Wow! How did you pull through?" sympathised his friends.
"I don't know," the boy replied. "Toughest spelling test I ever had."

My pet parrot
An English professor complained to the pet shop proprietor, "The parrot I purchased uses improper language."
"I'm surprised," said the owner. "I've never taught that bird to swear."
"Oh, it isn't that," explained the professor. "But yesterday I heard him split an infinitive."

The mongoose crisis
The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: "I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."
He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: "I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."
Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. "Everyone knows no full-stocked zoo should be without a mongoose," he typed. "Please send us two of them."

Greetings
Mr Goldberg, from Pinsk, coming to America, shared a table in the ship's dining room with a Frenchman. Mr Goldberg could speak neither French nor English; the Frenchman could speak neither Russian nor Yiddish.
The first day out, the Frenchman approached the table, bowed and said, "Bon appétit!"
Goldberg, puzzled for a moment, bowed back and replied "Goldberg."
Every day, at every meal, the same routine occured.
On the fifth day, another passenger took Goldberg aside. "Listen, the Frenchman isn't telling you his name. He's saying 'Good Appetite,' that's what 'Bon appétit!' means."
At the next meal, Mr Goldberg, beaming, bowed to the Frenchman and said, "Bon appétit!".
And the Frenchman, beaming, replied: "Goldberg!"

The language barriers
A Mexican bandit held up a bank in Tucson. The sheriff and his deputy chased him. When they captured him, and the sheriff, who couldn't speak Spanish, asked him where he'd hidden the money. "No se nada," he replied.
The sheriff put a gun to the bandit's head and said to his bi-lingual deputy: "Tell him that if he doesn't tell us where the money is right now, I'll blow his brains out."
Upon receiving the translation, the bandit became very animated. "Ya me acuerdo! Tienen que caminar tres cuadradas hasta ese gran arbol. Debajo del arbol, alli esta el dinero."
The sheriff leaned forward. "Yeah? Well..?"
The deputy replied: "He says he wants to die like a man."

Word game
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed and dry cleaners depressed?
Laundry workers could decrease, eventually becoming depressed and depleted! Even more, bedmakers will be debunked, baseball players will be debased, landscapers will be deflowered, bulldozer operators will be degraded, software engineers will be detested, and even musical composers will eventually decompose.