Language abuse…historic bloopers, part 1

I’m a history buff, so this mash-up of student bloopers makes me laugh until I cry.  I don’t know if you’ll cry, but I’m quite sure you’ll laugh, possibly out loud.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORLD

‘The World According to Student Bloopers’

by Richard Lederer

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers through the U.S., from eighth grade through college. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies, and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation.

The pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, “Am I my brother’s son?”

God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother’s birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs. But they did not take to it. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

Later came Job, who had one trouble after another.  Eventually, he lost all his cattle and all his children and had to go live alone with his wife in the dessert.

The Greeks were a highly sculptured people and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns–Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic–and built the Apocalypse. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the river Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appears in The Illiad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died after an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.

The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.

Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out the words, “Tee, hee, Brutus.”  Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Rome came with too many luxuries and baths.  At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. They took two baths in two days, and that’s the cause of the fall of Rome. Today Rome is full of fallen arches.

That’s the end for this week. We’ll get to the Middle Ages and beyond next week.