“I Told My Wife I Wanted To Be Cremated. She Made An Appointment For Tuesday.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution
“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface who acts as though he were pope, little or no greeting. Let your great fatuity know that in temporalities we are subject to no-one…”
Philip IV “the Fair” of France responding to a letter from Pope Boniface VIII rebuking the king for appointing clerics without regard to papal wishes, a letter that was conspicuously burned, quoted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300
“Here is someone who with a great effort is going to say something very silly.”
Terence, quoted in Pascal Pensées
“All this is the result of your imprudence and stupidity.”
A letter from Pope Gregory II to Emperor Leo III in 727 AD excerpted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300 [also from my “Don’t mince words, Bones” file]
“Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the ‘Any’ key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859) The term ‘any key’ does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.”
http://web14.compaq.com/falco/detail.asp?FAQnum=FAQ2859 as of Jan. 6, 2002, forwarded by a suitably appalled friend
“I’m not sure I believe all this stuff about genetically modified food being bad for you. I just had a really tasty leg of salmon and I feel fine…”
Emailed by a friend October 31, 2024, as a graphic and without attribution
“REMEMBER/ PERFORM HAND HYGIENE”
Sign I encountered just outside “DAY SURGERY WAITING ROOM” in Ottawa Hospital Riverside at 6:30 AM on a January 2025 morning, then a graphic of someone’s hands getting either soap or sanitizer to clarify this atrocious jargon [to be fair followed by the French plain-language “RAPPEL/ LAVEZ VOUS SOUVENT LES MAINS”]
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Douglas Adams, emailed by a friend and attributed to “Mostly Harmless, 1992”