Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

A 911 dispatcher gets a call from a man nearly in hysterics. "It's my friend!" the man shrieks. "We were out hunting when he grabbed his chest and collapsed! He isn't breathing! I think he's dead!"

"Alright, sir," the dispatcher says. "Try and stay calm. Let's make sure he's dead before jumping to any conclusions."

"Okay!" the man says. "Hold on..." There's a pause, then the sound of a rifle shot. Then he comes back on the line. "Okay," he says. "Now what?"

hysterical...

ouch, funny but then again not

yeah, it is dark - for me the appeal is from a linguistic POV. Just this morning, for some unknown reason, I flashed on a saying we used to bandy about in high school: "Your ass is grass!", meaning "Oh, you're in trouble now!". Why grass? I can understand "your ass" - a much abused body part often kicked, whipped, or beaten - but grass? Maybe it's related somehow to Cockney rhyming slang, via some weird parallel evolution... I dunno.

How many linguists does it take to change a light bulb?

Just one, but only after finding verifiable citations of similar changes in the past

like the cockey rhyming theory, bees and honey (money) but it's shortened from "your ass is grass and I'm the lawnmower" which makes more sense as a threat.

I don't remember ever explicitly hearing the 2nd half, though it was sometimes humorously implied. I seem to recall it more in the sense of "Boy, I'm glad I'm not in your shoes!!"