Past Winners

"Yes, once i came face to face with a lion, and to make matters worse, I was alone and weapon less."

"Goodness! What did you do?"

"What could I do? First I tried looking straight into his eyes, but he kept crawling up on me. Then I thought of plunging my arm down his throat, grabbing him by the tail and turning him inside out, but I decided it would be too dangerous. Yet he continued creeping up on me. I had to think fast...."

"How did you get away?"

"I just left him and passed on to the next cage."

During a lesson about adjectives, my friend, an elementary school teacher, asked her class to describe their mothers. One boy described his mother’s hair as auburn.

Impressed by his sophisticated word choice, my friend asked, “How do you know her hair color is auburn?”

Her student replied, “Because that’s what it says on the box.”

In San Diego to work with military linguists, my colleague and I checked into a hotel and ordered a 5 a.m. wake-up call. The next morning, the phone didn’t ring until 5:30.

“You were supposed to call us at 5 a.m.!” I admonished the desk clerk on the other end of the line. “What if I had to close a ­million-dollar contract this morning? Your oversight would have cost me the deal!”

“Sir,” he said calmly, “if you had to close that type of deal, I doubt you’d be staying in this type of hotel.”

While touring an old Roman prison the first tourist says: "Listen to this. It says here that in some old Roman prisons they have unearthed the petrified remains of some of the prisoners."

Second tourist: "Gracious, that must be where the name 'hardened criminals' originated."