My favorite one is “Marble Cream Slabbery”.
You know … when you’re trying to say something and it comes out almost right, but completely wrong. Usually, it happens when you mix up the first letters of a couple of words, and the result almost always sounds funny.
One day my family and I were in Houston and someone had the bright idea of finding an ice cream parlor so we could all get a cool treat (that melts in record time in the Houston heat, of course). Instead of “Marble Slab Creamery”, it came out “Marble Cream Slabbery”.
It sounded so funny, and we laughed so hard! And of course, when something tickles our funny bones that much, it usually sticks. To this day, we call it “Marble Cream Slabbery”.
I’ll never forget when one of my childhood friends told me her chips were lapped. Whenever my lips are dry, I still say, “My chips are lapped.”
Another favorite one is “windshiper”.
When I was a teenager, I drove a really cute, but really old, Kharmann Ghia. Things were forever going wrong with it.
One very late night, my best friend and I were driving home from another friend’s house in a torrential rainstorm. It was pouring buckets, thundering, lightning, and the streets were beginning to fill with water.
The windshield wipers stopped working.
I couldn’t see a thing out of my windshield, but being teenagers, it never occurred to us to maybe pull over until the storm passed.
So, we rolled down both windows, she stuck her head out her window, and I stuck my head out mine. I continued down the street, very slowly. Every time she could see the curb on her side of the street, she would yell “Curb!!” and I would pull back to the center. And when I saw the curb on my side, I would turn back the other way. On top of that, we were laughing so hard, we could hardly breathe.
Well, I guess to a policeman, this sight would look pretty much like a drunk trying to find his way home. A car, with two drenched girls hanging out either window, in the pouring rain, weaving slowly down the road.
Sure enough, we got pulled over. That made it even funnier.
When he walked up to the car, I couldn’t stop laughing, no matter how hard I tried. I would get two or three words out, then burst out laughing again.
I finally got out the words, “My windshipers are broken!”
That pretty much put the nail in the coffin as far as the officer was concerned. Now he was more than convinced he had a couple of juvenile delinquents on his hands, what with the slurred speech and all.
We finally calmed down long enough to explain what had happened. By the end of our story, even the officer was amused, and he started laughing with us. He was nice enough to follow us all the way home.
And we still call them “windshipers”.
