what this country is like at its core.

Which country?

In my entire time at elementary school I think the most newsworthy story was this girl who peed her pants while we were walking around the hallways because she was too shy to ask to go earlier

Then in my entire time at highschool, the most newsworthy story was when this same girl ate out another on a living room table at a party

To be honest, this is a very common occurrence in all UK schools up to ages ~13. I and at least 10 other students in my year group of ~150 were forced to wet ourselves in the middle of class because our requests to go to the bathroom were denied, not even by particularly 'toxic' or 'mean' teachers, it's just a fairly normal attitude. I remember asking to go for like the fifth time, the teacher said "You can wait.", and in response I showed her my piss-covered hand.

You'd think cleaning up all the piss would be enough to deter that policy, but apparently not.

It is child abuse though, and these really shitty attitudes to the needs of children are not spoken out against nearly as much as they should be.

There was this older long term substitute I had in late elementary for a few weeks who was very anti bathroom and would deny permission. This was an awakening for me, when denied I simply got out of my chair and walked to the bathroom. They aren't going to physically prevent me from doing so and the only way the school could do anything in response was tell my parents who would say I was correct to do what I did. Detention? Just don't go. Suspension? Fucking day off. This lifted a weight off me that has stayed off me since. I'm a reasonable dude with a pretty exemplary moral bearing and if I see a rule as capricious or arbitrary I feel very confident in ignoring it if the consequences or more or less null. Measured assertiveness rules, people can ask me to do things but no one can tell me to do things.

Honestly that's just cool though, we love a good dog don't we folks

Admins please, tagline material

the funniest part of this tale is that you though she was just saying that to somebody

Absolutely, absolutely

Can you do better?

Im sure most people who personally knew Karl at the time remembered him for things like that

why is that even embarrassing. that seems like a sucky situation and a valid reason to ask for help

'Mannschaft' corresponds to 'mannskap' in Norwegian.

My dad had the complete set of Stewart Clark's Broken English books, and there's a ton of fun anecdotes like yours in those books, many of them based on Scandinavians' English mistakes. I should probably share a few of my favorites in a different thread.

My brother and I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian, and so we've had plenty of our own language mix-ups during the course of our lives: it took me embarrassingly long to realize that 'Kingdom of Norway' is 'Kongeriket Norge' and not 'Kongeriket av Norge' (age 13~14), that 'eventuelt' non est 'eventually' but rather 'possibly' (age 15~16) and that 'smal' non est 'small' but rather 'narrow' (age 20~21). My brother on the other hand pretty recently revealed that he still thought that 'sad' was an English-language synonym of 'semen' or 'sperm', by conflating it with Norwegian 'sæd' (which is actually cognate with 'seed'), and this is a mistake that I swear both of us made as kids, but which I evidently grew out of much faster.

My brother when he was a little kid also once said instead of "spider-like body", "eddercup-acty crap" (←edderkoppaktig kropp). What's interesting is that dialectal English does actually have the word 'attercop' for 'spider', and that Wiktionary asserts that 'crap' and 'kropp' actually are related. The semantic shift seems to be roughly like so: body → head of a plant → chaff → something discarded → poopydoodoo.

Dude probably loved that though

Not gonna lie, if I was completely new to climate science and had never seen nor heard a photo nor video nor drawing nor audio recording nor impression nor Epic Rap Battles of History costume of Jim Henson in my life; and I didn't know that Jim Henson famously died in 1990 from toxic shock syndrome complete with that little drawing of Mickey Mouse consoling Kermit; and I wasn't the type of person who hears the difference between Henson and Hansen (met-mat merger is real and valid!); and I wasn't the type of person to stop and think about how incredibly unlikely it is for one to inexplicably go from puppeteering to climate research... Yeah, that undergrad is literally me though. I 100% read "[...] teaching a class about it. We had Jim Hansen--extremely famous [...]" and my brain just stopped for a moment thinking, "Wait, is that a typo of the name of the Muppets guy‽‽ That's one Hell of a twist right there..."

We love a bit of "say the first shit that pops into your head" energy sometimes, cheers to that undergrad wherever she is now, and I'm sure Jim Hansen gets things like that all the time.

people who shit/piss themselves to show fascist teachers they are serious actually rule. so does orgasm/organism thinking about it

I am so unsure of what to do with this information that my brain just played the PS1 startup sound

how embarrassing!

Another asshole at my boarding school once copied my math homework as I wrote the word "Elephant" as the answer to a math question