Funny directions

Recently bought a new rechargeable lantern for the hay barn - the description is a hoot!

Love the translation - "outdoor imitation beast"!  Can't wait to experience that functionality!  Or maybe I should be afraid - very afraid!

Bostich does not have the issue with translation, but have a sense of humor. On boxes of hand pounder nail, it says, "Pointy End Should Be Pointing Down".

Before people became irresponsible and spoiled it for everyone (by blowing fingers off hands and losing eyesight by doing stupid things), we used to celebrate the old English tradition of Guy Fawkes Night = bonfires and fireworks.

Many of the widely available fireworks came from China.

Instructions were funny:

'Light fuse, run fast!'

F Agricola wrote:Before people became irresponsible and spoiled it for everyone (by blowing fingers off hands and losing eyesight by doing stupid things), we used to celebrate the old English tradition of Guy Fawkes Night = bonfires and fireworks.

Many of the widely available fireworks came from China.

Instructions were funny:

'Light fuse, run fast!'

For years Maine had laws against fire works, and our lovely neighbors...New Hampshire people, laughed at us, as we waved our sparklers on our side of the Saco Rover, while they were blowing things up with their legalized fireworks that amounted to C-4. I mean, they do have the motto, "Live Free of Die". Now that is a strong statement if there ever was one...Live free or DIE!

So Maine gets with the times and allows fireworks, and what does one dumb Mainer from Lubec do with that new found freedom? He puts a M80 on top of his head and touches it off. Oh yeah, he died from trying that.  

Travis Johnson wrote:He puts a M80 on top of his head and touches it off. Oh yeah, he died from trying that.  

Holy crap. And I thought we here in Bananaland were imprudent with explosives.

The translator crowd gets very upset with this kind of thing. I see it in my own market-- people insist that nobody can understand their language as well as they do, so they don't let anyone who is actually native in the target language (English, in this case) do the translation. Plus, there are very, very few people who have good enough language skills, and then there is that thing where nobody wants to pay actual money when "google does it for free". Et voilá: absolute garble.

Travis Johnson wrote:So Maine gets with the times and allows fireworks, and what does one dumb Mainer from Lubec do with that new found freedom? He puts a M80 on top of his head and touches it off. Oh yeah, he died from trying that.

Removing oneself from the gene pool in that manner only goes to prove Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection.

F Agricola wrote:

Travis Johnson wrote:So Maine gets with the times and allows fireworks, and what does one dumb Mainer from Lubec do with that new found freedom? He puts a M80 on top of his head and touches it off. Oh yeah, he died from trying that.

Removing oneself from the gene pool in that manner only goes to prove Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection.

Yes, this is a struggle for me too. Yes all life is priceless, BUT sometimes....

When I first saw this thread title, I thought Artie had some old duffer give him directions somewhere. (LOL)

I have to admit that I am really bad at this. I still give directions based on "turn right at the old school house". The Old school house burned in the late 1960's, and I am only 45 years old. But since I know where it used to be, but always heard directions given like this from my Grandparents, I still continue that habit to this day. It makes for very long directions, because it goes like this:

"Oh yeah I know where you are going. You cannot really get there from here, but take a right at the old school house. Okay, that is no longer there, that burned a long time ago, but you will know where it used to be because the phone company now has a small substation there. It is gray, and has a mini backup generator next to it. Oh, you cannot miss it. Then you go a few miles and turn left where the huge Oak tree used to be, well that is not there anymore either, but you will know when you are there because you will see..." and so it goes.

Another habit I have, is telling people the true shortest way to get to a place when they ask for "the shortest way to get there". After they are gone, I am sure to tell them that "I would not go that way though", since it is a barely passable road. But they did ask for the shortest way! To get to my house, GPS will literally take you down a snowmobile trail, so it gets sketchy around here.

I consulted Google Maps, when I was very close but couldn't find, Otter Bay Road, on Pender Island, a small Island near Vancouver Island.

I punched it in and the friendly voice was very helpful. Turn this way, then that way, then drive 3 km, what? I knew I was very close.

Turns out there's another Otter Bay Road somewhere in Oregon and Google Maps thought I might like to go there instead of to the one that was just around the corner from where I did the search.

Now imagine that you're riding in your self-driving car, in the future. You tell it to take you to Otter Bay Road and you wake up 8 hours later and realize the car has bought its own gas and taken you across an international border. No matter what you had planned for that day, you're going to be late. :-)

Good point, Travis, maybe a better title would have been funny translations!

My recollections of getting directions in Maine are something like “Ayup, you cain’t get thayar from heyar”

Many years ago I was doing state taxes for my business. I hit a long thick paragraph in the instructions that basically said: If this, which is defined as that, unless you have this, or that, which is defined as this, unless you file this form or have these exemptions, which would be on that form, or this which doesn't apply if you are this that or that... I picked my way through it, got to the end, there was no verb. If this then WHAT? It was nothing but a long string of clauses, sub-clauses, definitions and referrals to other sections or documents.

I diagrammed the entire paragraph neatly (thank you Sister Catherine Marie! I can diagram any sentence, no matter how tortured) and took it to the local tax office. I said "If this then WHAT?" She examined the diagramming, looked at it all... No verb. She called the state office, faxed them my diagramming. They read it all. The person at the state office said "that paragraph has been in that form for at least 5 years, I wonder what everyone has been doing when they got to it?"

We had something similar here Pearl.

A few years ago dairy farming was a business that was losing tons of dairy farms, so the dairy farmers had their coop hire a mathematician from the University of Vermont to look into the way the Maine Dairy Farm Commission calculated the pay for Maine Milk. What they found out was, the equation was not complete, there was no possible way to make it equate to anything. So the man made some assumptions and as close as he could tell, the Maine Milk Commission was $3 less per 100 pounds of milk then it should have been.

They got caught with their pants down, they literally were making up prices for these dairy farmers.

Pearl Sutton wrote:Many years ago I was doing state taxes for my business. I hit a long thick paragraph in the instructions that basically said: If this, which is defined as that, unless you have this, or that, which is defined as this, unless you file this form or have these exemptions, which would be on that form, or this which doesn't apply if you are this that or that... I picked my way through it, got to the end, there was no verb. If this then WHAT? It was nothing but a long string of clauses, sub-clauses, definitions and referrals to other sections or documents.

I diagrammed the entire paragraph neatly (thank you Sister Catherine Marie! I can diagram any sentence, no matter how tortured) and took it to the local tax office. I said "If this then WHAT?" She examined the diagramming, looked at it all... No verb. She called the state office, faxed them my diagramming. They read it all. The person at the state office said "that paragraph has been in that form for at least 5 years, I wonder what everyone has been doing when they got to it?"

I am so jealous of you! I believe this is something called "Linguistics", and it always fascinated me, but I know very little about it.

I do know a very famous singer in the 1960's signed a contract thinking it meant this, but actually meant the opposite, and he was legally stolen from by a bad contract. So he started looking into wording, and made a business out of it. Some of his work was actually in murder trials where he would prove by word choice, that say...a murdered woman did not write the suicide note, but the person that killed her did, to try and make it look like a suicide. That sort of thing, and he could prove it in a court of law by word choice.

I have a very complicated sentence structure, it often appearing as a run on sentence like this one, but it is properly worded. I learned this from my teacher in 8th grade we called Mr. Jim, but I have no idea what he exactly taught that allowed me to pick it up. But my sentence structure would be very easy to distinguish, which is another way of saying; I would suck at trying to make forgeries of word documents!

Travis Johnson wrote:

Pearl Sutton wrote: It was nothing but a long string of clauses, sub-clauses, definitions and referrals to other sections or documents.

I diagrammed the entire paragraph neatly (thank you Sister Catherine Marie! I can diagram any sentence, no matter how tortured)

I am so jealous of you! I believe this is something called "Linguistics", and it always fascinated me, but I know very little about it.

Linguistics is the more scientific studying of how language works, how it evolves, why it means what it does, grammar is what they teach you in school is "good language" in whatever language you speak. Diagramming a sentence is a grammar skill. The nuns were big on good grammar skills. Found a good article on it here: The difference between grammar and linguistics

So he started looking into wording, and made a business out of it. Some of his work was actually in murder trials where he would prove by word choice, that say...a murdered woman did not write the suicide note, but the person that killed her did, to try and make it look like a suicide. That sort of thing, and he could prove it in a court of law by word choice.

I have a very complicated sentence structure, it often appearing as a run on sentence like this one, but it is properly worded.  But my sentence structure would be very easy to distinguish, which is another way of saying; I would suck at trying to make forgeries of word documents!

I too use a complicated sentence structure, I also speak that way if I don't consciously put work into suppressing it so "normal" people can understand me. I also use odd word choices that are not common. I CAN speak or write "normally" and might be able to fake someone else's style if I had bunch of their writing to work with, but generally my word choice is alien enough that my writing is totally identifiable to anyone who knows it.

Luckily due to these instructions I knew not to eat the package while it was closed.