From the keepen-dem-mittengrabben-offen dep’t:
Polly Harris is a woman of many talents. Search and rescue worker, computer game programmer, intensely physical martial artist, and (reserve) police officer. To top it all off, she has a great sense of humor and has become the ad hoc discoverer-of-hilarious-quotes-on-weblogs for a small mailing list I participate in. Read the original article at the National Review (careful, due to one exceptionally-long sentence, the whole page ends up really, really wide), or Mean Mr. Mustard’s excerpt, reprinted here almost in its entirety.
We English-speaking peoples should keep hold of the essential fact about foreign languages: they exist to make us laugh. It is considered exquisitely polite in Thai for a gentleman to end every spoken sentence with the otherwise-meaningless syllable krap. (The equivalent for ladies is ka.) Sawat-di will do for a greeting, but Sawat-di krap is much classier.
“Eyebrows on fire” say the Chinese when they’re in a tearing hurry, and one common Chinese term for “homosexual” is “chicken-rapist” (derived from the position, not from the object of desire). Latin has been making schoolboys snicker since the Middle Ages: as late as the 1970s, British TV ran a sitcom, Up Pompeii, about a Roman family whose elderly patriarch bore the name Ludicrus Sextus.
German has a word for the hollow space behind your knee: kniebeuge, pronounced “k-nee-boy-geh”. German is, in fact, a language rich in hilarity, difficult to speak for long without giggling. The German for “constipated” is verstopft; “rhinitis” is Nasenschleimheit (literally “nose-sliminess”). An excursion is of course an Ausfahrt, while auto exhaust is Auspuff. I even, for reasons I cannot explain, find the German word for “elbow” difficult to utter with a straight face: Ellenbogen. (The large bone of the forearm is the Ellenbogenknochen. See what I mean?) The sound and length of German names is a staple of British comedy: recall Monty Python’s interview with that strangely neglected composer "Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crasscrenbon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle-dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelterwasser- kurstlich- himbleeisen- bahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- ein- nurnburger- bratwustle- gernspurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumberaber- shonedanker- kalbsfleisch- mittler- aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm"?
And of course there that weird business of the verb at the end of the sentence putting is.
Not to be outdone, John’s Olsen’s response to Polly’s reprint of this to the list was short and to the point:
‘Plain old English is fun too. Dad gets a book for a bedtime story, and the kid says: “What did you bring the book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for”‘