Job Discussion Forums

[buravirgil]

This is why English is the coolest and craziest language at the same time.
(from Distractify.com)

by Averi Clements
The author admits many of these have circulated the internet for a while, but some have not.

Some examples:
#1. I never said she stole my money.
This fun sentence takes on seven different meanings depending on which word is emphasized.
#6. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
This sentence contains every single letter of the alphabet, while using the smallest number of letters to do so.
#8. A woman without her man is nothing.
As the story goes, a professor told his class to correctly punctuate the sentence. The males in the classroom wrote, “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women in the class wrote, “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” With just a simple change in punctuation, the entire meaning of the sentence was changed in an instant.
#11. Read rhymes with lead, and read rhymes with lead, but read and lead don’t rhyme, and neither do read and lead.

This last one is an iteration of an exercise with a relatively long tradition. I have two resources cribbed from Google searches of which one is relatively "easy" that I've given to NNESTs, while another is nearly impossible for NESTs to cold read without repeatedly stalling. The intent of the exercise is similar to a common ESL training exercise of asking a trainee to read text written in a Cyrillic alphabet.

[water rat]

Well done, buravirgil. If we had an award for most interesting post of the month, or even the first quarter of the year, you'd certainly win it.

I clicked your link and saw that you chose to leave out a few of the twenty. That's fine; except that you left out my favorite. I think it has been mentioned before but I couldn't find it in a search of this website.

[buravirgil]

Thanks for the kudos, Water Rat. Coming from this year's King of April's Fools, the compliment is duly regarded.