This has already been sent to me as a CIDU twice today.
My aunt and uncle were married for over 60 years. My aunt is really, really smart, but… a bit on the gullible side. He would always be saying things… well, like this… and she’d always fall for it.
Toward the end of his life, when I saw him doing it again, I said “Uncle Doug, doesn’t this ever get old?” and he said “Nope. Never.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Gullible is an odd word. It’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, you know.
Synchronicity:
Today I got my package of new underwear — my only splurge from Black Friday sales, and a chance to throw out my old briefs that are somewhere beyond 7 years old.
I suggested to my wife that I take the old pairs to Goodwill, and she bit on the joke just like Janis did.
Threw out 10 pair last year when I got some new ones. Still regret it.
Gullible is too in the OED right next to a picture of me.
And, of course, there’s an XKCD for that:
Concur with Uncle Doug. Never gets old.
I asked my mother, who is 80, how she’d gotten the oak tree in her back yard topped, and she said, ‘Oh, you know, I just shimmied up there with a limb-lopper and had at it.’ She’s usually not one to tall-tale, and I’m usually not one to fall for it, but her straight face was killer that day. Had me imagining in horror my mother 25 feet in the air lumberjacking. Ten minutes of ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that’ later, she finally said she’d hired a guy.
She was laughing about that for the next week.
That’s why you shouldn’t buy white underwear. It’s not a stain if you can’t see it.
Some people buy underwear with the days of the week embroidered on them, and some people buy underwear with the months of the year.
I told my 80-year-old mother that gullible wasn’t in the dictionary and she fell for it, despite having a Master’s in English, being fluent in several languages, and being married to a linguist for over 50 years. The next time I spoke to her, she called me a Very Bad Word.
Phil, was the Very Bad Word in the dictionary?
Hah! Yes, it was. Seven letters, begins with A, ends with E, kinda sounds like “hassle”.
Remembering that she was 80+ and my mom, that counts as a VERY bad word!
Some words came to the dictionary surprisingly late. The word “racist” is not in the main body of the original OED or in the first printings of the Second Edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. Both are pre-1930. The word appears in later printings in the “new words” section. (If you happen to have the Compact Edition of the OED with the magnifying glass that came out in the 1970’s you can verify this.) Apparently racism was to the 19th century what water is to fish: so much a part of everything that it wasn’t even a concept.
OED citations: gull, v. to dupe, 1550; gull, n. a credulous person, 1594; gullibility 1793; gullible 1805.
@Mark: Indeed. Another surprise: “privacy” in the sense we use it — freedom from intrusion–dates only to the early 1800s.
And another one: “doubt” now means to disbelieve, but in “Pamela” and even as late as “The Mill on the Floss” it means to fear: “I doubt Tom’s in trouble now” meant “I fear Tom’s in trouble now.”
‘“privacy” in the sense we use it — freedom from intrusion–dates only to the early 1800s.’
My dictionary traces “Concealment of what is said or done” back to Shakespeare.
… so a sufficiently old geezer would replace FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) with DUD (doubt, uncertainty, and doubt) … making them a fuddy-duddy…
In India, “doubt” has come to mean “question”, but not in the “I don’t think that is correct”, but in the “request for information” sense.
Arthur: Well, I wasn’t there, but I have seen the “1800s” ref repeatedly. Doesn’t make it correct, of course!
PSIII, and I saw the dictionary entry that referenced Shakespeare, but didn’t see his actual usage. So, again, maybe but maybe not.
Arthur: And even if he did, how do we know it was really Shakespeare? :)
It wasn’t Shakespeare. It was another playwright with the same name.
I came across this gem today:
“Nor, Roger thought, had Mr Chitterwick any serious doubt as to the possibility of Sir Charles being guilty, though he was still looking so alarmed at Mrs Fielder-Flemming’s temerity in suggesting such a thing that it was not altogether possible to say what he did think. Indeed Roger was quite sure that nobody entertained the least suspicion of Sir Charles’ innocence except Mrs Fielder-Flemming — and perhaps, from the look of him, Sir Charles himself.”
In the ordinary way, you’d expect that to mean everyone thinks he’s guilty, but it’s the opposite.
Published 1936, written in England.
Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc are not allowed to take donations of used underwear or socks, the general wording implies not of unopened packages either. However, apparently one of the most asked for items at various donation places by the people coming in is for socks and one of the organizations is asking for them.
Now, Robert’s problem is that since I last bought him new underwear (briefs) they have changed the shape of them. The distance from waistband to bottom of them i s considerably less than they used to have and he cannot find any that he likes a they are all too short (and he is a short person). I have started sewing new elastic into the waists for him to keep his old ones up.
On the other hand – I can no longer find the socks I like – they also are too short – and have taught myself to darn to keep them going.