Thread: Анекдоты showing "Verbs of Motion" (or other points of Russian grammar)

Originally Posted by Soft sign

There’s nothing to do with snipers in the joke.
The boy had in mind the meaning ‘to take a picture’ of course. His parents could understand that as ‘to take hanged men out from the gallows’.

Thanks very much, Soft sign! I've corrected my glossary for the post.

By the way, after thinking about it: the pun with вешать simply doesn't work in English, but one could make an analogous joke: "Dear Mom and Dad, yesterday I learned how to use a digital camera, and today I shot all my friends while they were eating dinner."

Also, as some of you may know: TRADITIONALLY, the verb "to hang" was irregular (hang, hung, have hung) in contexts like "вешать цветочный горшок с потолка", but was regular (hang, hanged, have hanged) when it means казнить кого-н. повешением.

And in slang, if you say "He is hung," it's understood to mean "His thing hangs low" -- in other words, "У него член висит до пола". But nowadays, there is a tendency to ignore this distinction, and to use the IRREGULAR past/passive "hung" in all contexts. (More often, there's a tendency for the irregular forms to disappear in favor of regular forms -- for instance, "dreamed" is now much more common than "dreamt." But in this case, the regular "hanged" is disappearing, except in well-educated speech.)

Which leads to the following classic joke from the movie Blazing Saddles, in which the black hero is sentenced to be hanged (after he hits a white racist cowboy with a shovel), but then receives a pardon at the last moment, and is reunited with his friends:

"Bart! Oh, Bart, man, you's alive! Nigga, they told us you was HUNG!"
"Well, I don't like to brag, but they're right..."

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

"вешать цветочный горшок с потолка"

Вешать с чего-л. sounds wrong.
«Подве́шивать цвето́чный горшо́к к потолку́»