Recently, Reddit user u/KarvedHeart asked people, "What is the stupidest thing you have ever heard out of someone's mouth?"
And the responses had me cracking up...but also left me very concerned for society. You just have to see them for yourself:
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
1. "A woman I know adopted a baby from an Eastern European country. Someone who worked in our city’s education system said, 'But when she grows up, how will you understand what she’s saying?'”
2. "'London is the Paris of New York,' said my friend after a few drinks. We never let him forget it."
3. "My brother, 17 at the time, said he was impressed by actors' dedication of dying for a movie."
4. "After a work accident, a coworker asked me, with a very serious face, if my finger would grow back."
5. "I worked at a hippie crystal store in the mall. These girls came up and were looking at our amethyst cathedrals (BIG pretty chunks of amethyst). One reached out to touch it, and her friend immediately held her back and pulled her away, yelling, 'Don’t touch that! It’s amethyst! Being around it gives you asthma!!' She was genuinely upset…I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard that one."
6. "I was in a Warby Parker one day, and there was a married couple being waited on ahead of me. I'd guess they were both maybe 50. The sales guy was showing them a pair of transition lenses, and the man just could not understand them. The sales guy tried to explain them. His wife tried to explain them. He just kept replying, 'But I don't understand how they give you night vision?' They brought him outside to show him how the lenses darken in sunlight so you don't need a separate pair of sunglasses, and he was like 'Oh! OK, I get it now! But how does the night vision work?' After 20 minutes or so, they gave up trying to explain to him that the glasses do not give you night vision."
7. "My sister asked, 'How do left-handed people drive?' as she then proceeded to try and drive left-footed."
8. "When I was leaving the movie Titanic in 1997, I passed a person and overheard them say, 'That movie was so unrealistic. No ship like that would sink.' They legit hadn’t heard of the sinking of the Titanic and thought the events in the movie were fiction."
9. "My dumbass of an older brother asked, 'What's chicken made out of?'"
10. “A woman at a bar told me tampons have asbestos in them to make you bleed more, so you need to buy more of them. I just laughed and asked, 'Where’d you hear that? On the internet?' as this was 2003/2004 in the era of chain emails and non-facts floating around online. Not surprisingly, yes, she did read it online."
11. "I was working midnights back in the '80s. It was almost dawn, and a few of us were hanging out in the parking lot. Venus was blazing away in the pre-dawn sky. I pointed it out to my coworkers and how it was easy to find in the sky when I got interrupted by one of the guys standing there. He was pretty adamant that the sun revolved around the Earth."
12. "I overheard a conversation on a cruise deck between two people. One said, 'Look at how many stars there are out there.' The other said, 'Yeah, they’re actually pretty big too. If one crashed all the way in the water over there, I bet it would splash us over here.'”
13. “In sophomore year of high school, I once heard, 'Kansas isn’t a real state…hahaha…it was just in The Wizard of Oz.”
14. "I'm a vet tech and was giving discharge instructions to a dog owner after a neuter. After the dog was neutered, the owner goes, 'So where are his stitches?' I say, 'Oh, between his legs.' He asks, 'His front legs or back legs?' I went, '...his back legs.'"
15. "A star basketball player in my high school health class once said, 'I think being cryogenically frozen would be cool because you could see the future. I'd have to bring a space heater or a blanket or something though. I don't like being cold.'"
16. "I heard someone ask, 'Is the president of the United States also the president of Canada?'"
17. "My brother-in-law plastered baby oil all over his body and sat out in the sun for two hours. I told him he was going to get skin cancer. His response was, 'I don't believe in skin cancer.' This is the guy who refuses to have a microwave in his house because, 'They are bad for you.'"
18. "At an old job, we had balloons in the office leftover from a kid's birthday party in the restaurant. A server came in and said, ‘Oh, balloons!’ She then picked a balloon up OFF THE GROUND, opened it, inhaled the air, and said, 'Hello all,' excitedly. She then went, ‘Oh! Why didn’t it work?’ Her face when I explained to her that wasn’t helium she had just breathed in, but some dad’s breath that’d been in the balloon for hours, was priceless."
19. "Someone told me that I am technically not a twin because I was born two minutes earlier than my brother instead of exactly at the same time."
20. "My uncle once said plastic wasn't bad for the environment because, 'It’s not like it’s not of the earth. Everything in it came from here.'"
21. "A 23-year-old in one of my college classes said, 'I thought snow was just the dust that blows off mountains and rain was when the snow melted.'"
22. “Someone said, 'Anthropology? Isn’t that that religion invented by Sir Isaac Newton?' This is the first quote in a notebook I have that is full of unironic lines by people in my freshman-year history class."
23. "A girl in my 10th-grade class said, "Meat comes from a factory. It's not made from animals!"
24. "Someone told me, 'Humans aren't destroying the planet. The planet is trying to kill us, so we are fighting back.' WHAT?"
25. "My girlfriend and I were playing a mobile trivia game against each other, and one of the questions was about Pearl Harbor. She said, 'I didn't know when Pear Harbor died. How was I supposed to know?'"
26. “I heard someone ask, 'How does water not fall off the side of the Earth?'”
27. “Someone asked, 'Hey, you speak Brazil?'”
28. "Back in high school, there was some free time during a computer class, so we were all talking, and somehow the conversation turned to geography. One of my classmates had a whole lot of misconceptions about geography including, but not limited to, 'China and Canada are continents.' And 'Paris' is a country.”
29. "I told my friend, 'OMG, today a fourth-grade student asked me whether the boy cows or the girl cows lay eggs? Where do I even start!' They said, 'What do you mean? Just keep it simple and tell him the girl cows.'"
30. "I was asked, 'Can I see your ID?' as I was trying to buy sparkling water."
