What is the past tense for 'choose'? What is the length of a 40 ft container? What is your older brothers father to you?

Depends
posted by y2karl at 4:26 PM on July 10

(opens envelope taped to forehead, reads: Name a sanitary undergarment.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:33 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

Like obviously snakes don't have external ears but I went this long figuring they just had a "normal" hearing situation going on inside their heads. I went to look it up in defense of that one kid whose friends laughed at him for saying what I would have said and, turns out, they do not have ears. They sense sound through a sensitive extension of their jawbone.

That's actually really cool.

You can tell a lot of these folks are just on-the-spot and unprepared for the types of questions. I would be terrible at this, which is part of why I feel OK finding it pretty funny.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 4:35 PM on July 10

What's my older brother's father to me?

What's my older brother's father to you?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:44 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

I think the guy asked to define “vague” chose to act it out, in a stunning display of pedagogy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:51 PM on July 10

I live in fear that I will be put in the spot like this some day. That and parallel parking with someone filming me. Makes me want to never leave my house. I know I would forget everything I'd ever learned.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:27 PM on July 10

Kind of weird he is asking a lot of people who clearly don’t speak English as their first language about irregular tenses, or math questions where they need to first translate the meaning of the operation to know what he is asking. Like yeah, 6+2 is 8, but what is 6 @#*” 2, where @#*” is some kind of math thing that might be adding or multiplying or something else, so let’s just go on our hunch and attempt multiplying? And then they look dumb on camera.

The clearly educated native English speakers who get simple arithmetic and international geography questions wrong, okay those are funny. And Parmesan IS a seasoning. It’s just a seasoning that comes from a cheese. Cinnamon is a seasoning that comes from bark.
posted by Mizu at 5:29 PM on July 10

My older brother's father? A mystery. A riddle. A mark upon my family tree that signals divergence, bitterness, and regret. How can I speak to you of my father's betrayal? How shall I bon mot the bitterness of her infidelities, repeated, unrepentant, years before my unlucky conception? A long shadow lay over me, the uncertainties brought on by the cast of my eye, the curl of my hair. I look for him in the mirror, but he is a ghost, a man I have never met but that I cannot escape. Do I speak like him, the interloper, or was I truly my father's daughter? Do I doubt, the way he doubts? Do I sneak home late, in the hopes of catching some glimpse of maternal malfeasance that could confirm, or do I pad in the door in the wee hours like a tomcat, like that other man, like my older brother's father? We stalk the halls, the two of us, in this half empty manor, he the tall lost patriarch, broken by his love for her and inability to leave, and I, much smaller, in linen nightgowns and threadbare gowns, I am a satellite locked in motion by the tides of their desires. Would she go to him, if I were not here? Would she flee the hollow heart of my father for this other man, were it not for the shade of her daughter?

I cannot tell you of my older brother's father. I can only tell you of what he left behind.
posted by Jilder at 5:52 PM on July 10

But the other one, that's 'chosen', and you can go with 'selected' if you aren't sure.
posted by Jilder at 5:52 PM on July 10

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