Errant Tongues

I think that every college student dreams of someday using that oh so important education to get a job at some elusive place without idiots. Sorry, kids. It's not going to happen. Idiots are everywhere. They come in all different shapes and sizes, but they show up in abundance. Some idiots are funny. Some make you want to slap them. Some are even dangerous. But the terrible truth is that we've all been idiots at one time or another. I have certainly had my fair share of idiotic moments.

Lately, I've been noticing several fleeting moments of idiocy - mainly the kind that comes from saying the wrong thing. Just the other day, I told someone that a Latin American person was translating something in Latin instead of in Spanish. As soon as it came out of my mouth, I knew that I had misspoken. Unfortunately, my sister caught it, too.

One of my favorite examples of this is several years old. My friend (we'll call her Gertrude) had one of those gloriously horrible moments when her brain just wasn't working in conjunction with her mouth. Of course, she can be excused because she was in the 10th grade at the time, but it was still hilarious. I had mentioned something about the family from Nepal at my church. The ensuing conversation went a little like this:

Gertrude: Nepal...isn't that in California?
Me: No, Gertrude. That's Napa.
Gertrude: Oh! Nepal is in Italy, right?
Me: No Gertrude. That's Naples. Nepal is a country next to India. Mount Everest is in Nepal.
Gertrude: Oh! I never got why Mount Everest was in Nepal. I mean, it has our presidents' faces carved in it?

Conversations like this seem to happen around me quite often. I'm not sure why that is, but another infamous one in my circle of friends happened around the same time. This one was between another friend (we'll call her Ernestine) and her sister while they were watching the Olympics on TV from Athens, Greece. Ernestine said:

"This is in Greece? Is that even still a country? What do they speak there? Grecian?"

I have, of course, never let either of them live these moments down. I will say, though, that both Gertrude and Ernestine are very successful at their own universities and are both well on their way to taking their chosen fields by storm. One is now a nationally renowned singer and the other has been lauded for her humanitarian efforts in her community and won a prestigious position among her fellow students.

Moments like this are fleeting, but they make for interesting memories. I'm sure everyone out there has had some sort of slip of the tongue or mouth/brain disconnect. The important thing is never to forget about them and tease your friends mercilessly.