It is very common that Chinese students have English notebooks. It is even more common to have hilarious English written on these notebooks.

The last student journals I picked up had one about Winnie the Pooh (for some odd reason, he’s really popular over here). It said (verbatim), “It’s a Caking sort of day. Smells that sweet mean What’s for Supper A Rather Heaping Helping of Honey Pie. Hums while Savoring Inhaling sorts of Smells which tickle the nose. Sticky Tastes as left on the paw. Sweetish and Sourish Treats.”

And now, I want to share one with a poem:

“Have you been to The Land of Happy,

Where everyone’s happy all day,

Where they joke and they sing

Of the happiest things,

And everything’s jolly and gay?”

And for ambiguity at its best…”Everyone talks about it, but no one has really seen it. You are my mermaid, and I’ll protect you.” What?!

You gotta love it!

For my Freshmen Oral class, I assigned them some homework. In two to four weeks, they will be reading various English jokes, songs, and quotes. I told them to select three samples of English writing from any source. I will choose 1 and ½ to 2 minutes worth of material for them to read in class, so they can practice reading verbally before an audience in class.

Well, I got some good samples.

Here’s the first good one:

It is not easy to be on a diet and a trip to the local supermarket filled with all kinds of temptations can be a torture. So it is a real delight, on my way back from the local store, to see a car whose owner has come to terms with his oversized body. His bumper sticker read, “Fat People Are Harder to Kidnap.”

But the following one was great. I laughed out loud when I read it. Here it is (sorry, I don’t know the source): 

“Tit for Tat”
An American lady, traveling in England some years ago, got in a compartment of a smoking carriage where an Englishman was smoking a pipe. For a short time she sat quietly expecting that the Englishman would stop smoking. But then she began to cough and sneeze trying to show him that she objected to the smoke. At last, seeing that the man took no notice of her, and did not put out his pipe, she said:

“If you were a gentleman you would stop smoking when a lady got into the carriage.”

“If you were a lady,” replied the Englishman, “you wouldn’t got into a smoking carriage.”

“If you were my husband,” said the American lady angrily, “I would give you poison.”

The Englishman looked at her for a minute or two.

“Well”, he said at last, “if I were your husband, I would take it.”