| 1. Keys? Kiss? A friend of mine was giving an English lesson to a class of adult who had recently come to live in the United States. After placing quite a number of everyday objects on a table, he asked various members of the class to give him the ruler, the book, the pen and so on. The class went very smoothly and the students seemed interested and serious about the work that they were engaged in - - until my friend turned to an Italian student and said, "Give me the keys." The man looked surprised and somewhat at a loss. Seeing this, my friend thought that the student hadn't heard him clearly, so he repeated. "Give me the keys." The Italian shrugged his shoulders. Then, he threw his arms around the teacher's neck and kissed him on both cheeks. 2. Skunk "We have a skunk in the basement," shrieked the caller to the police dispatcher. "How can we get it out?" "Take some bread crumbs," said the dispatcher, "and put down a trail from the basement out to the back yard. Then leave the cellar door open." Sometime later the resident called back. "Did you get rid of it?" asked the dispatcher. "No," replied the caller. "Now I have two skunks in there!" 3. A Fine Match One day a lady saw a mouse running across her kitchen floor. She was very afraid of mouse, so she ran out of the house, got into a bus and went to the shops. There she bought a mousetrap. The shopkeeper said to her, "Put some cheese in it and you will soon catch that mouse." The lady went home with her mousetrap, but when she looked in her cupboard, she could not find any cheese in it. She did not want to go back to the shop, because it was very late, so she cut a picture of some cheese out of a magazine and put that in the trap. Surprisingly, the picture of the cheese was quite successful! When the lady came down to the kitchen the next morning she found a picture of a mouse in the trap beside the picture of the cheese! |