i just wanna put a useless switch in there
“Relax, they’re not talking about us. It’s a false alarm.”
Whoa Black Betty, Smork Alam
This is the picture that randomly pops into my head and makes me start cry laughing no matter what I’m doing. It just gets me.
This probably came from a country with transliterations that don’t line up very well in English. Like Japanese doesn’t have an English r, so one of the ways they do it is to elongate a vowel and alarm would become alaamu. But sometimes they have a long vowel with no r, like smoke is sumo-oku.
When they go to write in English it’s not clear whether that long vowel represents an r or not, and they chose to add it in smoke and drop it in alarm. I still run across a smorking room from time to time.
Okay but why is it inherently funny though?
Where there’s smork there’s fier.
Foir
How alaming!
Whoa-oh black Betty
alamdalam
I saw a “NO SMORKING” sign on Engrish dot com circa 2001 or so
Why is this so funny?
Engrish
This makes perfect sense in Leeds
Someone in Hull told me that they had a door-to-door salesman selling “smirk alarms”.
Ehrmagerd!
Some years back, there was a “toad trail” in Hull - one of those things where there’s 100 sculptures installed around the city, each painted by a different artist, school or group.
Anyway, the vowel shift in Hull that turns “smoke” into “smirk” gave us the joyous sentence:
“I’m off into town to go and see all the brightly coloured turds”
That isn’t smork it’s stream, stream from the streamed clams we’re having
smorks your alarm
How did you fail at that? You had to get two words correct but managed to not do it, shame on you.
You know what? Screw you!
Unsmorks your alam
Alam go face
