Boat Jokes (we need a few laughs)

It means to make an attempt without knowing, a guess, to fake it. The pianist is asking the customer to hum a little of the song and from that point the pianist would make up the rest.

The joke is that we don't get any information about the monkey.

 

My english is improving!

 

The joke turned into a balls-up ? This needs to be mentioned to insert boating relevance to the discussion.

The term "balls-up" dates from the days of wooden sailing ships when the existence of a shipboard disaster, such as plague, lack of food or water, mutiny, etc. was communicated to the outside world by hoisting large-ish, brightly painted wooden balls up into the rigging. Balls of different colors represented different disasters and therefore served as either requests for assistance or warnings to stay clear.

I had no idea that was the origin of that term.

 

Mijn Nederlandse is ook verbeteren; maybe not. "Mijn Nederlands is ook aan het verbeteren" per Angelique #6380.

 

Sometimes expressions are hard to get in a foreign language since the literal translation often is not right. What I do in those cases is Google the phrase and add the word meaning. Google ‘‘wing it meaning’’ gives about the same explanation as W9GFO says in post #6375 . .

P.S. - Just read the next page, which is this one, so also Googled ‘‘balls up meaning’’

 

The Dutch often use more words, they presumably would say here something like: ‘‘ Mijn Nederlands is ook aan het verbeteren. ’’

P.S. - ‘‘Nederlandse’’ without the addition of a subject literally means ‘‘Dutch woman’’

 

True story: my granddad used to work in Venezuela years ago. His boss was multiple generation Venezuelan, at least six or seven, but his family still considered themselves German. He was also highly fluent in numerable languages and could manage different accents with ease. He could also apparently act.

Anyhoo, one day the fellow was driving through the countryside when a federal patrolman pulled him over and asked him something along the lines of, in Spanish of course, "do you know how fast you were going?"

The man was to have just looked confused and responded, with a Texas accent, "Yo no fume español."

The cop just shook his head, walked back to his patrol car, and waved him on.

When he got back to the station house he probably gathered people together saying they'd not believe what this gringo just told him.

 

My imagination of the word "wing it" is to put wings on it to make it "fly". To improvise and make a go out of it.

As W9GFO would say,"and from that point the pianist would make up the rest"

 

A fellow was talking to his psychologist, telling him about the horrible stress headaches he'd been having still, and that nothing they'd tried seemed to have worked.

The psychologist put his fingers to his lips before speaking: "What I'm about to say to you isn't an approved of treatment for stress and stress related headaches but we've exhausted conventional remedy attempts, so.... I too once suffered as you do. Oh, the pain! And nothing ever seemed to work. But then one day I was, um, having oral sex with my wife and her thighs were clamped so tightly around my head that it was actually hurting. But then I noticed that my headache seemed better, my unsolvable stress relieved. So for the next several weeks, at least once a day, we did the same and not only did my headaches go away but the stress too.... So! That's what I want you to try. And when we meet again in two weeks we'll see if there's any improvement."

Two weeks passed.

The patient came in all smiles, praising the doctor's therapy, relating that after a week the headaches had subsided and after only a few more days the stress too. In fact, he happily reported, he was sleeping like a baby at night.

"Oh, and Doc, I just have to say this: you have a beautiful home!"

 

Dutch wife seems to be something else in English: Dutch wife -- Dutch wife -- there's also a bamboo version of it . .

 

I think the joke here is that the wives at home thought the Dutch traders in Indonesia slept with the bamboo . .

 

re balls up. A dissenting opinion from Michael Quinion, an editor of the OED. It's not an old term in England and doesn't appear to have originated there.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bal1.htm

 

The bamboo Dutch wife as a cooling device is fascinating. I'm glad I clicked the link, as the scale of the device, and hence its use, isn't quite clear in the photo!

There's a lot of slang terms in English that rely on adding a different nationality adjective to an object. Many of them are lewd or euphemistic, I'm afraid!

 

A blonde man is in the bathroom and his wife shouts: "Did you find the shampoo?"
He answers, "Yes, but I'm not sure what to do... it's for dry hair, and I've just wet mine."
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A blonde man goes to the vet with his goldfish.
"I think it's got epilepsy," he tells the vet.
The vet takes a look and says, "It seems calm enough to me."
The blonde man says, "Wait, I haven't taken it out of the bowl yet."
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A blonde man spies a letter lying on his doormat.
It says on the envelope "DO NOT BEND ".
He spends the next 2 hours trying to figure out how to pick it up.
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A blonde man shouts frantically into the phone, "My wife is pregnant and her* contractions
are only two minutes apart!"
"Is this her first child?" asks the Doctor.
"No!" he shouts, "this is her husband!"
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A blonde man was driving home, drunk as a skunk. Suddenly he has to swerve to avoid a tree, then another, then another.
A cop car pulls him over, so he tells the cop about all the trees in the road.
The cop says, "That's your air freshener swinging about!"
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A blonde man's dog goes missing and he is frantic.* His wife says "Why don't you put an ad in the paper?"
He does, but two weeks later the dog is still missing.
"What did you put in the paper?" his wife asks.
"Here boy!" he replies.
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A blonde man is in jail.* The guard looks in his cell and sees him hanging by his feet.
"Just WHAT are you doing?" he asks.
"Hanging myself," the blonde replies.
"The rope should be around your neck" says the guard.
"I tried that," he replies, "but then I couldn't breathe."
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(This one actually makes sense.)
An Italian tourist asks a blonde man: "Why do scuba divers always fall backwards off their boats?"
To which the blonde man replies: "If they fell forward, they'd still be in the boat."
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A friend told the blonde man: "Christmas is on a Friday this year."
The blonde man then said, "Let's hope it's not the 13th."
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Two blonde men find three grenades, and they decide to take them to a police station.
One asked: "What if one explodes before we get there?"
The other says: "We'll lie and say we only found two."
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A woman phoned her blonde neighbour man and said: "Close your curtains the next time you & your wife are having sex.* The whole street was watching and laughing at you yesterday."
To which the blonde man replied: "Well the joke's on all of you because I wasn't even at home."

 

Seems to be an open question. I might have even guessed it was related to a part of the play in the game of Australian Rules Football, where when play breaks down with messy disputed possession of the ball, the remedy is having the umpire bounce the ball so the contest can resume. Called a "ball-up". Don't like the game myself, and neither does the rest of the world, but in the city of Melbourne it is something akin to a religion, such is the fanatacism ! But not likely the origin of "balls up".