"I've just had the most awful time," said a boy to his friends. "First I got angina pectoris, then arteriosclerosis. Just as I was recovering, I got psoriasis. They gave me hypodermics, and to top it all, tonsillitis was followed by appendectomy."

"Wow! How did you pull through?" sympathized his friends.

"I don't know," the boy replied. "Toughest spelling test I ever had."

An English professor complained to the pet shop proprietor, "The parrot I purchased uses improper language."
"I'm surprised," said the owner. "I've never taught that bird to swear."
"Oh, it isn't that," explained the professor. "But yesterday I heard him split an infinitive."

The linguist's husband walked in and caught his wife sleeping with a young co-ed. He said, "Why, Susan, I'm surprised." She bolted upright, pointed her finger and corrected him, "No. I am surprised. You are astonished."

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."
A voice from the back of the room retorted, "Yeah, right."

The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: "I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."

He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: "I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience."

Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. "Everyone knows no full-stocked zoo should be without a mongoose," he typed. "Please send us two of them."