Yesterday my colleague had sent me a meme of a gas station sign, but instead of numerical prices it said "LOL" for regular gas, ""OMG" for Premium, "WTF" for Supreme, and "Bend Over" for Diesel, then underneath it said: "We provide KY jelly to help ease the pain of your next gas purchase!" I replied, "Hahaha" and didn't think much more about it, until this afternoon when she wanted to go on a walk for our break so we could discuss the joke. Apparently she hadn't been aware of what the "bend over" and K-Y jelly implied until a grad student told her it was bad, so she had to find out how bad.
We started our walk and immediately heard a train, so we ran as fast as we could to the spot from which you can see the train, and it got there just as we did. My FitBit said we burned ten calories a minute running, but then I was very slow after that, so our whole walk averaged six calories per minute. Anyway, my colleague probably didn't want me to be too out of breath so I could explain the joke. So then I had to explain about prison rape and that K-Y jelly is a lubricant to make the rape less painful. She had no idea what K-Y jelly was and had assumed it was like PBJ, something you made a sandwich out of, so eating would ease the pain of your expensive gas purchase. She said, "I sent this meme to my sons too! And they probably know what it meant! But they probably knew I didn't know what it meant." She said her sons always have to explain things to her, like when she smelled an unpleasant smell on a train and they told her it was marijuana. She asked how they knew that, and they said people at their high school smoked it. Then she told me they had a saying in Chinese about "eating tofu" that had a bad sexual connotation, but she's been away from China for so long that she doesn't understand the new slang. That could just be our age, because I can barely understand new English slang. Totes my goats? Cheugy? Whatever.
This is not the first dirty joke I've had to explain to my colleague. Just the other day I was struggling to explain this joke: "What's the difference between David Copperfield and the Rockettes? David Copperfield has a cunning array of stunts." This joke makes a lot of assumptions, like that you know David Copperfield is a magician, the Rockettes are chorus girls, and that awful c-word that all women hate. So it's as much cultural as linguistic, really. Since I don't know any dirty jokes in any of the foreign languages I've studied, that tells you how hard they really are to translate.
Famous Hat
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