"What did you just say to me?" Such is a question that conveys utter bafflement, confusion, and disbelief at the words of someone else. Surely, it's a phrase that we've all said once or twice in our lives—idiotic things are said all the time by family members, friends, and passerbys. The stories below were shared by people who were victims of these stupid statements. Whether it was gibberish, something too heavily accented to understand, or something simply so wrong that it couldn't possibly have been uttered by a thinking human being, these are the most idiotic things the authors have heard in their lives.
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#1 Anti-Baby Wipes
My mother works at a large hospital. One time, she told me an 18-year-old came in freaking out about the results of her ultrasound. After my mother informed her that she was pregnant, the girl said, "That's impossible!" So my mom asked, "Okay, well, what kind of birth control have you been on? We can see if there were any complications." The girl said, "I use the no-baby wipes. I stole them the last time I was here."
#2 Magical Toothbrush
I once got a cool toothbrush when I was little. I asked, with big excited eyes, "Is it waterproof?" After they said yes, I ran to the bathroom and ran it under the tap repeatedly in amazement... I was absolutely entranced by the fact that the water would just slip by the toothbrush. I must have spent hours and hours just running the tap over the toothbrush...
#3 A Classic Dumping Maneuver
I briefly dated a guy who came up with these two zingers: one, that the Great Pyramids were in California because "the pyramids are in the desert and the desert is in California," and two, that African people can't speak Spanish because "they're from Africa, they can only speak African." I pointed out that African Americans speak English fluently and he couldn't wrap his head around this mind-blowing contradiction. I then dumped him. The old stump and dump.
#4 Beginning Of A Gum War
A friend of mine noticed another one of our friends whip out a pack of 5 Gum. He got mad, claiming that he was the one who discovered 5 Gum and that the other friend was copying him. This was a 10-minute argument. "You copied my gum bro," he said in full earnest. Who knew that the brand of one's gum was so important?
#5 Teaching Foolishness
My first-grade teacher and I got into an argument about the existence of hummingbirds. I said they did, and she said they didn’t. I went home crying to my mom about it. During the next parent-teacher conference, my mom was like, “Oh and by the way, hummingbirds are real. So don’t tell my daughter they aren’t anymore.”
#6 Feline Spawning Behavior
I had an ex who thought all cats in existence were male because he had never seen a pregnant female cat or witnessed a cat birth. He just thought they spawned at random points and set out into the world, I guess. The guy was truly, deeply stupid. I couldn't believe I dated him and, to this day, I'm ashamed to be his ex because of that petty little thing.
#7 Suffering Equals Exercise, Right?
My brother recently started working out to work on his weight and health. When he told me that, I said, "If you really cared about your health, you'd stop drinking soda." He replied, in a serious tone, "Drinking soda gives my stomach exercise." He wasn't even joking. He really thought that the fizz from the soda activated his abdominal muscles.
#8 Back To Geography Class
I once had a good college friend who lived in Alaska. She was rooming with someone who was, let's just say, a little bit on the ditsy side. One time, when we were all hanging out, the girl asked my Alaskan friend if she visited Hawaii often. Her response was, of course, "No. Why?" To all of our shock and horror, she replied, "Well, because they're right next to each other right?" referring to how Hawaii and Alaska were always kind of tucked away at the bottom of the map. She was, sadly, not joking.
#9 It's A Little Too Late
I was once watching Walking with Dinosaurs, the David Attenborough documentary, with my ex. A T-Rex and some other big dinosaur were fighting and the T-Rex got wrecked. It was lying on a lakeside dying and my ex said, “Awwwwww, isn’t there anything the camera crew can do for it?” I had no words. I just burst out into laughter.
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#10 Frozen Electricity
My dad is an electrical lineman. He got a call out to a lady’s house where he noticed there was no problem. He asked her why she called and she directed him to a wire that had exposed wire for a few inches. She pointed at it and said he needed to wrap it back up with insulating tape so it would stop freezing.
“So what will stop freezing?” he said.
“Electricity.”
“What makes you think electricity is freezing?”
“Well, every time I turn my toaster on in the morning, it is frozen in the line and everything shuts off.” He explained how she needed to try plugging it in across the room and that electricity can’t freeze and she said, “Well, ya make it outta the water, don’t ya?”
#11 Flip A Rectangle? Insane!
I work at Home Depot in the paint department.
Customer: "Hey, this tarp is 8×11, but I need one that’s 11×8.
Me (laughing): "That’s funny."
*The customer has a deadly serious look.*
Me: "Wait are you serious?"
Customer: "Yeah, I’m freaking serious."
Me: "Um, just turn it."
Customer: "Oh, just turn it huh, guy? I’ll go to Lowe’s and find someone who knows what the heck they’re talking about."
Me (laughing again): "Okay, dude."
#12 East Coast, West Coast, Same Difference
A group of friends and I were sitting at a restaurant having dinner, talking about China and what would happen if they invaded the States. My buddy said, "They'd cross the Pacific over to California! WE CAN'T LOSE CALIFORNIA, WASHINGTON D.C. IS OVER THERE!" I'm guessing the guy didn't do so hot in geography class.
#13 They Even Have The Same Author!
A coworker was telling me he was mad that he wasted his time seeing The Hobbit. He said it was a ripoff of The Lord of the Rings. Like legitimately. He noted that it had the same magic invisible ring, the same little people, and wizards. He called it a bad DnD movie. I'm not sure how he didn't clue in that The Hobbit is part of The Lord of The Rings universe...
#14 Planetgazing
I went on a date with a girl in college and took her stargazing on a clear night. In the beautiful silence of feeling how small we are in the universe, I whispered, “It's incredible how the sun is a star like all these above us.” She says back to me, “The sun is a planet, silly.” Needless to say, I didn't ask her to go out on a second date.
#15 Meta-Searching
"Okay, now go to Yahoo and search for Google. Then, you click on the first link, and that takes you to Google." I overheard some young-ish people say this in a cafe a few years ago, not senior citizens. I almost had an aneurysm. I wanted so badly to interrupt their conversation and correct them, but I figured they didn't deserve the truth.
#16 Waiting Out The Spices
When I was in elementary school, a kid was sharing his Flamin' Hot Cheetos with friends. After a few minutes, this one kid was still holding his Cheeto. When we asked if he was going to eat it, he said, "I'm just waiting for it to cool off." He even took the Cheeto and started waving it through the air, as if it was letting out steam or something.
#17 Spork Sin
"The spork is 'the evil utensil' because it is the amalgamation of the masculine fork and the feminine spoon and is trying to blur gender lines in society." When I heard the guy say this, it instantly reminded me of the Christian lady who was trying to explain all of the subliminal messages in the Monster energy drink logo. What is wrong with people?
#18 Everything Below Sea Level Is Swimming
I went to a school full of dummies in the sixth grade. I heard some stupid stuff, but the dumbest thing had to be the girl who disagreed with my statement that Death Valley was hot. She said, “It’s below sea level, so it’s underwater.” I told her no, there’s elevated land around it, it’s in Nevada. After ten minutes of talking to basically a brick wall, she said something like, “Jesus will cleanse you of your lies” and walked away.
#19 No Power, No Car
The electricity on the entire street went out once. A guy I knew asked to go out in the car to the shop. Then, he stopped himself and said, “Oh sorry, I forgot, the car won’t work whilst electricity is out.” And no, the car wasn’t electric.
#20 Appearing And Disappearing Buttons?
My pregnant wife in an elevator started jabbing the button to the floor we were currently on. "Why isn't this working?!" A flash of embarrassment quickly turned to anger. "They shouldn't even put that button on here if we're already on that floor. Doesn't even make sense." The anger seemed to resolve back to an embarrassed blush after we traveled a few floors down.
#21 Maybe He's A Hippie
I worked front desk at a hotel, early morning shift. Was working with a new girl who, let’s face it, was dumb dumb dumb. I had gone out to the bars the night before, and one of my coworkers was out with me. He worked in the hotel bar. Me, knowing I had to work early, tied it up fairly early and went home. But, a coworker who worked in the bar was already intoxicated.
So, the next morning, I was working with the new girl. The time came for the bartender to arrive at work. He came up to the front desk, looking awfully rough, to get his cash drawer for the bar. I greeted him with, “Good morning sunshine! How ya’ feeling?” We exchanged stories, then he went off to get ready for the day. Meanwhile, the new coworker was fumbling around, and she finally asked me, DEAD SERIOUS: “Is that guy’s name really Sunshine??”
#22 The Chair Was For Style
My friend was at work with an employee, shortly after the death of the late great Stephen Hawking. My friend said out loud, "Wow, what a bummer about Stephen Hawking passing away." To which his employee responded "What?! No way! I didn't even know he was sick." The dude was in a wheelchair for the majority of his life..
#23 Just Making Up Animals
We were watching Clash of the Titans and my ex said, “Imagine if scorpions were real." After a few minutes trying to convince her they are, she followed up with, “Next, you’ll tell me reindeer are real.”
#24 Hovercars Are Pretty Expensive Though
My wife and I were going to Australia for a vacation and a few nights before we left, one of my friends asked me how long the DRIVE was going to take us. When I told him we were flying and I had no idea how long the flight would be...his response was, "Plane tickets are pretty expensive though. Wouldn't driving be cheaper in the long run...?"
#25 One Proves All
A guy back in high school tried to argue that wearing a seatbelt was actually more dangerous because he knew a guy that got in a wreck and he didn't wear his seatbelt. The cops later explained the reason why he didn't die in the wreck. I'm not arguing that him wearing a seatbelt may have endangered his life in this situation, I was more baffled that he thought this one in a thousandth circumstance was viable evidence that a seatbelt is more dangerous in every scenario possible.
#26 Giving Homeschool A Bad Name
I had a childhood friend who had a big fish tank in his room. The water was low and he commented on how much water the fish were drinking. I said it was probably evaporating. He said, “What’s that?” I explained the water cycle to him and he thought I was making the whole thing up. I said, "Where do you think rain comes from?" and he said, “God makes it, duh.”
I then asked where he thought the water on the ground disappears to and he said, "It soaks into the ground." I asked, "What about water puddles on the pavement?" He said it soaks into the pavement. He then continued to make fun of me for the rest of the day calling me stupid because I didn’t believe God made more rain every time it rained. We were probably 14 or 15 at the time and it was before smart phones so I couldn’t Google it to prove him wrong.
#27 Anatomy, As Understood By A High School Boy
I dated a guy once who asked how I could go #1 with a tampon. He was being totally serious. It was as if he had never taken a biology or anatomy class in his life. We were both in high school, so the relationship lasted a little longer after that. But not by much. I couldn't date a guy who was genuinely that stupid.
#28 Insult To Injury In A Moment Of Grief
A while back, my dog was supposed to be put down in a couple of days and my ex asked my mom, "Are you going to have him buried or castrated and put in a jar?" She obviously meant cremated, but this remains to be one of the dumbest moments I've experienced.
#29 The Word You Are Looking For Is "Library"
My ex-girlfriend once complained that books were too expensive. She said there should be a service where you could just read a book and then return it when you’ve finished. I was dumbfounded. There was absolutely no way she had never heard of a library before. How the heck did she get through kindergarten without sitting through at least one book reading in a library?
#30 How Much Is A Nickel?
I used to be a manager at a sandwich shop and I was training a new employee. After her first week was over, I asked her to count the register. She looked like she was having a hard time, so I went over and asked if she had any questions. She grabbed a nickel and asked me, “Um, how much is this?” She had lived in the country all her life, so it's not like the coinage was foreign to her.
#31 Crushing Her Tiny Dreams
I once had a girl in my Biology class say that she wanted to be friends with a tiny person and that she would want to raise him like a son. I was sort of confused, so I asked her if she wanted to give birth to tiny person, or if she was going try to adopt a tiny person. She went on to tell me that she nor anybody else could give birth to a tiny person because they were not people.
She even went on to say that there was, in fact, a store of some kind where you could buy midgets. I laughed thinking she was trying to troll me, but the look on her face was serious. I had to explain to her that tiny people were humans with dwarfism (which really took some persuasion and a Google search to convince her that dwarfism is a real thing).
After that discussion and some teasing from me and my classmates, she asked our teacher, "When you were younger, didn't you think you could buy a tiny person," to which our flamboyantly gay teacher responded, "Oh honey, you need to read more." This girl spent 16 years of her life believing that tiny people were not real people. In a way, I felt sorry for crushing her dreams.
#32 Chinese People Everywhere
We went on a school trip from Ireland to China a few years ago. We'd just gotten off the bus that brought us from the airport to our hotel in Beijing City. When we stepped off the bus, we heard this from one of my classmates: "I know we're in China and all lads, but I didn't expect to see this many Chinese people." We all spun around and stared at him because we were too stunned for words.
#33 The Definition Of Incurable Forbids That
I received a cold call from a life insurance company.
"Hello. Are you over 25?"
“Yes, but I’m not interested.”
"Why not?"
“I have an incurable disease. You guys won’t cover me.”
He replied “Oh. Yes. Uhh well, I hope you get better.”
I was like "...Uhh. I won’t, that’s kinda the point."
#34 It's All In Your Ear
I wear hearing aids and I have a complex hearing loss condition called “cookie bite," or sensorineural hearing loss. This lady came up to me and said, “I think you’re just mentally preventing yourself from hearing things properly and not really realizing that you have normal hearing.” OH REALLY? So you mean to tell me that while I have physical damage inside of my ear, an abnormal audiogram from my audiologist, special hearing aids worth almost two stacks that you CANNOT get unless you have approval from a doctor and a slight speech impairment that I’m “mentally” preventing myself from hearing properly?
#35 English In France And French In England
In college, I was talking to a girl in my dorm. I told her I was studying abroad in England for the summer. She said, in all seriousness, “Wow, that’s cool but how are you going to understand the classes? I didn’t know you spoke French.”
#36 Puppy Season
My boyfriend said we couldn't get a dog because we had to wait until the puppy season. He's very smart so it floored me when he indicated that he was dead serious. I was literally on the floor with laughter. It turned out that he had taken some info from some breeders, something to the effect of they can only breed the dogs every six months. He misconstrued it to mean that puppies are only born in the spring and the fall.
#37 History Simply Didn't Happen
When I was in college, a girl that a friend and I were talking to was ranting on and on about how 9/11 wasn't just an inside job. She said, "It was a hoax and the Twin Towers never existed in the first place." I thought she was just being satirical, so I said smartly, "Next, you're gonna tell me you think the Holocaust never happened, right?" And with the most serious face I've ever seen a person have, she said, "Oh, don't get me started on that."
She then went on a tirade about how the Holocaust was a hoax and was made up to justify why we entered WWII. She said all of this in front of a person whose grandmother, on his mother's side, survived the Holocaust. It didn't shock us to later find out she got expelled for continuously making anti-Semitic statements to those of Jewish descent.
#38 They're Little People. People!
We were waiting in line for something and my sister got tapped on the shoulder by a tiny person asking where she got her shoes. My sister was so startled, she blurted out the answer and dragged me away. I asked her what was wrong and her word-for-word response was, "I didn’t know they spoke, aren’t they a different species?" She was 16.
#39 The Earth Gets All Soft
I live in Japan. My American coworker and I were discussing the frequency of earthquakes.
Me: "We haven’t had an earthquake in a while."
Her: "Well, that’s because it’s summer. It’s not the season for earthquakes."
Me: "...What do you mean?"
Her: "Like, in summer it’s hot so it’s easier for the earth to slide around and stuff so there wouldn’t be many now because it’s winter."
Me: "I’m not sure that’s how it works."
I then gave her a crash course in plate tectonics.
#40 Qroissant Anyone?
I was trying to teach a brand new Junior Engineer the ropes. He was convinced he was hot stuff. I was checking his work and marking up what he needed to correct. He took this kind of personally, as any correction was an affront to his "rep." It was a large, open-plan office and I guess he was overly self-conscious of this.
He had badly misspelled a word. This was around the time when spell-checkers were starting to become a thing, but I decided to try and help future gaffs with some advice. "Craig, in the English language, if a word starts with a Q it is almost always followed with a U." "Oh yeah?! What about Croissant??!!" I guess it was the aggressive conviction with which he delivered it, more than the many levels of fail in that sentence, that caused the whole office to erupt in laughter. And, of course, over the following days, Craig was finding mini croissants in his coat pockets, his drawers, skewered on his car aerial, anywhere we could think to put one.
#41 Netflix As Proof
A girl told me over an entire dinner how she'd figured out that aliens were real. When I went by her place later to hang out, she showed me her evidence file... most of which was pulled from Netflix. Among the claims were that there was a tower on the moon the size of four Empire State Buildings. She invited me to come to see her give a presentation on this. I went, wanting to be polite, but I started to get really freaked out. Her room was filled with alien memorabilia—alien heads, alien body parts, etc. She made an hour-long seminar on how aliens were real, showing clips from various YouTube sightings and Netflix documentaries.
#42 Dogs And People Are Different
I work in a bookie, over 18-years-old only. A guy walks in with his primary school age daughter (maybe seven or eight). I explain that the minimum age to enter is 18. He just looks at me and says he thought so, but we let dogs in here. I then had to explain to him the difference between a dog and his young daughter. I've had so many hostile encounters working in a bookie, however, this dumb guy was the only one I've ever wanted to punch. I feel sorry for the daughter. The guy seemed to genuinely not see the difference.
#43 Just Really Hard Plants
A friend of mine was away for a couple of years and one day, when he was back, we were driving up the mountain to my mom's house. Along the road, there were a lot of huge boulders. He said, in all seriousness, “Wow, those rocks really grew big while I was away.” I was stunned. After a minute of processing that, I told him that rocks don’t grow. He insisted that they do.
#44 Nature Is Every Where, If You Pay Attention
My sister was genuinely baffled as to why we have zoos. I explained some could be used for conservation purposes and went down that route. It turns out that was not the path she was going down. This idiot thought we had monkeys roaming the streets, giraffes skipping around, and tigers happily keeping to themselves. She said instead of going to a zoo again, she would go on more walks and pay more attention. WE LIVE IN THE UNITED KINDOM. She’s 25 years old!
#45 Liquid Ice
One time, a customer asked me if we sold any unfrozen ice. I looked at him, incredulously, and when I saw he was serious, I chuckled while asking, "You mean water? It's behind you." He goes, "No, no. Unfrozen ice!" I stood there blankly looking at him. He gave an exasperated grunt and left. I laughed and wondered what the heck he actually wanted.
