argus

A recent comment on Preble’s blog has inspired me to share a simple and entertaining word game that a fellow nerd here at work shared with me, and that the whole cadre of nerds here occasionally will bring up during conversation: preposition switching, usually in person-to-person action phrases. This lends itself to some really funny foreigner-sounding sentences (ala the aforementioned blog comment). And in our experience, the best phrases are “risque” ones. That we find these particular sentences funnier may not come as much of a surprise given that we’re all mid- to lower-20s males.

As an example, for the sentence, “I want to make out with you” the game would suggest that you replace the word “with” with a different preposition. Popular choices are usually spatial, such as “around” or “at” — and the more believable a ‘mistaken’ word choice sounds, the funnier it is: ala “I want to make out at you.” Dropping an unexpected preposition swap into an already-funny story tends to double its impact :)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 3:39:41 pm and is filed under Foam, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.