Actual conversation between This Troper and his sister, who is married to a turkish man and whos daughter has just started to speak (although, in all fairness, he ''was'' speaking in swedish and still used the word ''bi-lingual''). #QUOTE# ''-So is she bi-lingual or what?'' #QUOTE# ''-Excuse me?'' #QUOTE# ''-Um... does she speak turkish?'' #QUOTE# ''-Well, she understands it, and it freaks me out.''

As a science fair project intended to test people's gullibility, a middle school student started a petition to ban the dangerous chemical "dihydrogen monoxide" from the school cafeteria on the grounds that its solid form can cause tissue damage through prolonged exposure, it is the key ingredient in acid rain, and can kill if inhaled. It's or "H[-2-]O."

This editor actually managed to pull this prank on his creative writing teacher.

Gave a speech about it in a ''college-level'' debate class. Got an A. Teacher never caught on she was being mocked. Wish I were kidding.

This editor pulled it off in an English class. Where we were discussing ''AnimalFarm'' and Orwellian DoubleSpeak.

This one pulled it off in poli-sci; it works in pretty much any class except chemistry, really.

This one pulled it off in chemistry: she, being the head student in the honors chem class, was invited to give a guest 'lecture' about how chemistry applies to everyday life. The science teacher, who's forte was not chemistry, didn't catch on until about halfway through the speech.

But someone still caught on. It works best when no one realizes the ruse until you let them in on it.

Penn & Teller pulled it off for an episode of their skeptic show "Bullshit!"

This troper usually prefers using the term hydrogen hydroxide, as most acids are hydrogen whatever, and most bases are whatever hydroxide, water has a neutral pH so I've pulled this off in my biology class (my chemistry teacher caught on after a small while, but I got her with the oxygen gag)

"Dihydrogen monoxide" works better, though, because it sounds creepier, given that the only other "monoxide" people are aware of is carbon monoxide. In general you can come up with plenty of situations where a political campaign subtly alters the actual correct scientific terminology for something in order to make it sound worse (or better; see the insistance of using ''fetus'' when the word any expectant mother would use is ''child'').

Um, 'fetus' ''is'' the correct scientific terminology as opposed to 'child', so your point appears to have been turned on its head...

This troper uses "hydroxylic acid". Again, exactly the same thing, but sounds just as scary if not more so ''and you can fool the people who already know about dihydrogen monoxide''.

Like most students, I used this as the subject for an english creative speaking oral I hadn't prepared for. Don't know if the teacher got it or not, but I got top marks. My favourite line is "*insert pet name here* has been shown to be a performance-enhancing drug and many athletes freely admit to taking it before or even during competitions. Furthermore, in many school students are not only permitted but actively encouraged to ingest it during exams and exam study to improve their result."

Did it as a presentation in english class- none of the audience, all of whom took chemistry, caught on.

The very first event of this troper's ninth grade science class was this. The teacher handed out a sheet detailing the horrors and dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, leading to many (including this troper) to get outraged at its continued existence. Most of the class fell for it, and the worst part is that it was an enriched science class.

In the same vein, A heated debate in This Tropers newspaper about whether you should shorten the dosage in prescription-free medicals to doses that isn't deadly if you take them all in one pretty much died when someone pointed out that ''water'' is lethal if you gulp down eight litres [sorry Anglo-Saxons] of it in one gulp.

Someone tried this on me, and I reversed it on them by telling them about the dangers of Oxide.

That's an incorrect term, if you're referring to oxygen. Oxides are any kind of material where dioxygen has reacted with a reducer to produce a toxic salt which can mechanically cause further reactions with reducers to produce more of itself. (In other words: rust. More generally, any salt where the negatively charged part is oxygen).

The Oxygen Gag: the most sinister of poisons, where in amounts as small as 1 mL people can die, but the more you have the more slowly you die, withering away in a very slow and agonizing process comparable to aging. The toxin? Oxygen of course.

Solanum lycopersicum (Wolf-peach) is a perennial nightshade plant native to Mexico. It is famous for being related to the bittersweet nightshade (S. dulcamara) and deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), both of which are also poisonous. It usually grows to a meter-long vine, has star-shaped yellow flowers and produces a large amount of red berries. All parts of the plant contain solanine, a highly poisonous alkaloid. Since there have been documented cases of children dying from solanine poisonings, eating S. lycopersicum is not recommended. A picture of the plant is here: http://tinyurl.com/64ubfk

This troper wondered if you were going for Expospeak or a TomatoSurprise with that one. *rimshot*

My theater teacher once explained that he had to 'obtain and replace an electromagnetic emitter' ...that is to say 'change a lightbulb.'

In high school, this editor once referred to an obnoxious jock at a lunch table as a "masticating homo sapien" and only avoided a pummeling when a teacher intervened. Upon learning what I had said, the teacher advised me that it wasn't nice to play with them like that.

The phrase "masticating thespians" came up more than once during lunch breaks for this editor's middle school play rehearsals.

This troper's honors English teacher is legendary for having told one boy (who was chewing gum in a rather loud fashion) "WILL YOU STOP MASTICATING IN MY CLASSROOM?!" HilarityEnsues.

Someone tried that on me once, asking, "Do you masticate?" My reply was "only when I eat."

This troper once almost got creamed in the sixth grade for telling a bully "What, do you find it detrimental to your masculinity?" and then being forced, after a blank stare, to explain "It means 'harmful to your manliness', bonehead."

This is why you Don't Explain The Joke.

ThisTroper is particularly fond of the phrase "I am an elastic hydrocarbon polymer and you are an adhesive compound, your statements are repelled from my surface and bonded to your's."

Do you watch TheBigBangTheory, by any chance?

Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?

This troper often uses sodium chloride and ammonium chloride in place of the common names for the chemicals. He also nearly always refers hydrochloric acid as hydrogen chloride.

You should be careful about the last one: there is a chemical difference between hydrochloric acid and hydrogen chloride. Unless you are careful enough to clarify the latter as "aqueous", you are actually talking about the form of HCl that is gaseous at room temperature. If you aren't careful around an informed jackass, like me, you will trip up there.

Once, at an Academic Team tournament (essentially a team-based, school sponsored trivia challenge), this Troper's team and their opponents were asked something along the lines of "What portion of the spectrum of visible light is most prevalent in our sky?" Every participant sat there, bewildered, looking at one another. All of our glances said the same thing: "Did he just ask us what color the sky is?" Finally, one of the aforementioned troper's teammates buzzed in with a bewildered "Blue?" Ten points.

This troper, who works the night shift at a major international retailer that rhymes with "stalwart", was in receiving one night only to see a giant spider prop for Halloween hung up on a cart for lugging around stock. So he told the receiving manager "I see you have a brobdingnagian arachnid affixed to your conveyance." He gave himself kudos for working the word "brobdingnagian" into ordinary conversation.

This troper has a natural tendency to use more technical and varied language under stress. Nobody ever believes that it's an accident.

After hearing that Adam Corolla once convinced over 1,000 women to sign a petition for ending women's suffrage, this troper attempted to do the same. He got about 25 signatures before a teacher ruined the joke.

When we starting dating, I affectionately called by girlfriend, "Mollusk Slobber". She got it, others within earshot did not.

Uh, "Snail Mucus"? "Octopus Spit?" Not getting that.

Pearls

Once in school, when I was being bullied by girls, I punched one of them between breasts (lightly, because I had no idea how much it would hurt, and still don't). She was stunned for a few seconds, enough for me to use the confusion and escape, and then blurted out, "Don't touch my mammary glands!"

Subverted with This Troper: Frequently, people will try to pretend to be as smart as me by throwing out random math terms (and occasionally random chemistry terms) but they always end up looking like total idiots. Notable examples include:

When I was asked to multiply ten times 30 in my head, which somebody thought was no big deal. He then asked me to multiply 10 thousand by 30 thousand, and when I answered correctly he was impressed.

The phrase "multiply by the cube root of X pi/0 plus pig to the 4X" actually became a meme for a while. Or, rather, we mocked it with increasingly stupid expressions until only I could actually remember it. Stuff like that happens all the time.

When doing a group project in English, somebody starting rambling about, I shit you not, a 400 pound Darth Vader as the idea I would probably think of for the project. I promptly left the group, wrote my own story (which the teacher, who has no taste or at the very least doesn't want to criticize anybody who doesn't do anything against her moral values, loved), and they wrote a story that raped the English language and knocked off the Magic Schoolbus's "travel through the human body" plot, except very, very badly.

One person asked me what "disulfitite kryptonium" multiplied by 3x was. When I said there wasn't an answer, he called me stupid. Cue me tutoring him on naming conventions, the fact you can't get an answer for an expression, and all the other things wrong with that.

There are more examples, but I feel like I've lowered everybodies faith in humanity enough.

Half of these have nothing to do with Expospeak, though.

Shush, he's telling us how awesome he is.

Not sure where we picked it up, but a long-running meme in my circle has been playing this off classic songs. The ur-example would be "My friends and I, together, share as our domicile a mid-spectrum double-hulled submersible vessel of war".

Maybe from bash.org: "The carbon-metabolizing physical presence that currently houses my conscious and those physical manifestations of my comrades all possess as our common residential abode the interior of a mid-visible spectrum double hulled buoyancy controlled ship of war!"

Okay, that ''needs'' to be a song.

An acutal quote from me is "Everyone underestimates brute force because it has the word 'brute' in it. They should rename it something classy like 'Explosive Management of Muscular Resources'".

This troper has talked about "gomiti in ''sauce mornay''." Kraft sells it in a blue box in the US.

This troper once insulted someone by calling them a polar body. The joke is that a polar body is a cell that is produced during oogenesis. It has no other purpose beyond serving as a dump for the excess DNA so that the single egg produced from oogenesis would be haploid. These bodies eventually degenerate. Thus, it is a biology related way of calling someone useless.

This Troper's psychology textbook posed the rhetorical question "If indeed endorphins lessen pain and boost mood, why not flood the brain with artificial opiates, thereby intensifying the brain's own 'feel-good' chemistry." Yes, that's right. This Troper's textbook advocates getting high.

But most methods of achieving metaphorical elevation involve naturally occurring opiates.

{{Excel-2010}}. I convinced my dad to allow me to go to an anime convention by telling him I was going to attend a "Technology in Culture" Symposium and that I should go since I'm a film student, after all. My internal justification: They have expensive projectors there.

Several decades ago, this troper's dad was once at a university where the computer science and engineering department faculty wanted a color TV for the faculty lounge, but they knew they couldn't possibly get anybody in charge to approve using the department's money to buy a TV. So they wrote up a proposal to buy a "RGB Multi-Purpose Cathode Ray Tube." It was approved.

This troper got to use one against some obnoxious Campus Socialists: #QUOTE# "You may, in fact, take your verified-broken system, and go forth to perform anatomically-improbable auto-intercourse."

Made my day.

This troper is still waiting for an opportunity to use "I should be greatly obliged if you would perish in a conflagration."

This troper sometimes does this without meaning to. Almost always, one person nearby will ask "What does that mean?" I read a lot, so it's understandable.

Same here. I can confuse people with six syllable words. Or I can aggrivate the neural synapses pertaining to translation of atrocious words of one syllable.

When he was in high school, this troper was able to justify having parties in classes by describing them to teachers as "valuable educational opportunities providing hands-on experience in exchanging ideas across vastly different cultural lines" (or something to that effect, I was honestly just making things up as I went). One teacher who didn't speak English all that well approved immediately. When they found out, the school administration was not amused.

This troper once walked into the kitchen on his nephew's birthday carrying a "Heated solution of sodium bicarbonate, ground chaff, sucrose, protein and raw fat adorned with inflammible wax scupltures"

I desperately wish for an occasion to say, "'Blunt force trauma caused by repeated and forceful applications of a standard-issue entrenching tool.' 'What?' 'Shovel to the face, Bitch!'" On second thought, maybe not.

In my stumbling upon this anecdote, I first got the notion I had left it myself at an earlier point on the timeline, but then realized, with no small chuckle, that I would not have thought twice about performing this particular action.

This troper has come across a math problem before. Namely, 10i + 6 < 6 + 30u. There are multiple ways to express this problem, many trickier to solve, but when you do figure it out, the answer amounts to [[spoiler:i<3u]].

This Troper once used Aperture Science in an example of a SQL Injection Attack during a class presentation, utilizing a fictitious "Forgot Password" page. In true Aperture style, he called it "the Aperture Science High-Bandwidth Archived Credential Recovery Annex... or in LaymansTerms, the Forgot Password page".

A conversation from earlier today: #QUOTE#'''Friend 1:''' We're fucked! #QUOTE#'''Friend 2:''' Language! #QUOTE#'''Friend 1:''' Oh. Sorry. We're sexual intercoursed!