I Can Eat Glass | Hacker News Reader

I Can Eat Glass

en.wikipedia.org

245 pointsvector_spaces91 comments

I haven't come across this one before, a similar project is https://omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm ('my hovercraft is full of eels' from Monty Python's Flying Circus)

Where are your howitzers?

And the very first cold-open sketch on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, in October 1975: John Belushi learning to say, "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines."

https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/saturday-night-lives-ver...

There's even PIE and Sumerian, hilarious.

One of the external links is a page that uses translations of the phrase as a UTF-8 rendering test. It has 150 translations, including some weird ones like Old Norse: ᛖᚴ ᚷᛖᛏ ᛖᛏᛁ ᚧ ᚷᛚᛖᚱ ᛘᚾ ᚦᛖᛋᛋ ᚨᚧ ᚡᛖ ᚱᚧᚨ ᛋᚨᚱ and Inuktitut: ᐊᓕᒍᖅ ᓂᕆᔭᕌᖓᒃᑯ ᓱᕋᙱᑦᑐᓐᓇᖅᑐᖓ

http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/utf8.html#glass

What synchronicity! My work slack status is currently this phrase, in Swahili, translated by a recent hire with whom I connected over love of language.

The one time I have been able to bust out my knowledge of Swedish (limited to this one phrase) in order to try and flirt, the focus of my attentions was... not impressed. I couldn't tell if it was because I was not impressive, or just a cultural mismatch. In any case, it didn't discourage me from continuing to learn.

It could also be that ice cream is very close to glass in Swedish. Matter in fact ice cream in Swedish is actually spelled the same as glass.

So depending on how well you pronounced it, you may just have said: I can eat ice cream, it doesn't hurt

edit: added a missing word

For those wondering, single consonant means slow vowel, double consonant means fast vowel, just like “floss”. So:

glass (swe) -> gláss (ice cream)

glas (swe) -> glaas (glass)

To make it even easier these two words also have different A-sounds, the first quick one has the one in english “tan”, the second has the one in “car”.

Plot twist, in Hiberno English that A-sound is the same in both words :)

Ice cream in French is also "glace" which is of course spelled differently but sounds pretty much the same as glass.

Swedish has a long history of importing words from French (as do many other European languages for obvious historical reasons), so I’m quite sure this is indeed the origin of the word.

What usually happened though was that after importing the word, it (sometimes) got a new spelling more compatible with Swedish phonetics. Other examples of this include Swedish “trottoar” (fr: “trottoir”)

I guess it's obvious in retrospect but I didn't realize that the Romanian trotuar is also an obvious French import.

A lot of Swedish words that end in -oar (like “reservoar”, “memoar” etc) are all french import originally ending in -oir, so if you start digging into words ending with -uar in Romanian you’ll probably find more :-)

I sort of wonder if this was a very elaborate joke.

Or even not depending - if something similar happened in English I'd just 'autocorrect' on my hearing to assume they were saying the saner thing or that contextually made most sense, even if they'd pronounced the other perfectly.

2019, 84 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21121982

Mainly anecdotes about fun language confusions ;)

For anyone who doesn't know, the student who made the 'I Can Eat Glass' project is Ethan Mollick. He's now a professor at Wharton and in my opinion he is the best public LLM whisperer!

He is the best

How interesting to use a comma splice in a phrase that's purpose-built for translations. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

Surprised this article doesn't mention "The king is dead, long live the king!"

Had no idea comma splice was considered error in english writing, has it always been like this?

The error IMO would be better described that there's a connective missing - 'so' or 'therefore', etc. - or else with that elided it should be a semicolon rather than a comma.

I love this. My coworkers and I call ourselves glasseaters since we're all so scrappy.

The guy who started this translation project (per the wikipedia) was himself a startup founder https://www.linkedin.com/in/emollick/.

It is strange that Wikipedia claims that this became a meme, yet knowyourmeme.com is completely unaware of its memeness. That website is typically a solid source for the dankest and/or most obscure memes you ever met.

I Can Eat Glass was definitely a thing, but in the late 1990s or perhaps very early 2000s. Sites such as knowyourmeme.com don't go nearly as far back.

The website was first picked up on the Internet Archive in 1999. I had no trouble finding memes from 1994-1996 on KYM, such as "Dancing Baby", "Ate My Balls", and "Goodtimes Virus".

In fact, clicking that "year:1994" turns up 108 results, so they're pretty comprehensive, although they only cover Web-based memes, usually with images, and not Usenet.

The Everything2 entry is dated April 12 2000.

Knowyourmeme is very late to the meme game. Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed on 4chan, fark, Slashdot, YTMND, and the bare metal internet long ago.

Bonsai Kitten is lost to the ravages of time.

I suppose if by "lost" you mean "extremely well documented with 457 thousand views" then yes, Bonsai Kittens are lost forever?

"Ah, you think dankness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dank; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the memes until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!" -Fark, probably

> Bonsai Kitten is lost to the ravages of time.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bonsai-kittens

I liked it better when the internet was made of cats. Now there are too many dogs and it's not as fun.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/007/447/yes...

Some external links in that article were mildly disturbing to me, bonsai babies in particular, I do not recommend clicking randomly.

Ah, back when people believed things they saw on the Internet.

What is the bare metal internet? Is it a series of tubes?

An information superhighway, if you will.

Is that what it was like before it was (re-)made of cats?

https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM?si=ZSQ7tFjidj0BlZhf

In the before times it was once sunny and warm; then the clouds came.

> Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"

I was millimeters away from responding w/ the pure inanity of "So can I. Once, anyway." But, your citation of OG meme-master Shelley inspired me to do better (18th century, and already prognosticating the rise of "CATS" - legend).

I refrained. ;)

You can help to complete the archives.

KYM is super biased in what ends up there, as it leans heavily towards 4chan and Reddit content, with heavy amounts of Twitch and certain genres in YouTube. It's missing a lot of memes popular among girls, especially from Tumblr. Similarly, it doesn't have a lot of TikTok trends & tropes that I'd consider to be memes.

It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.

Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie

The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.

The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.

Oh it’s lovely though isn’t it? It’s like gravity, it seems inexorable. Being incorrect in front of enough eyes is a path towards correctness. Oft a painful one, but almost always informative.

There's not reliably one way to translate something, and there could be Dutch versions much closer to the one shown here in Afrikaans, such as: "dat doet mij niet zeer". Regardless, the Afrikaanse version is already very readable to my Dutch eyes. So much that its misleading about how close the languages really are, because as you say, they have well diverged, and while there's a lot of similarities, there's also plenty of space for native speakers of either language to miss the gist of what's being said in the other language.

The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.

Thank you for that insight, which, thanks to my ignorance, is surprising!

As a first language Afrikaans speaker, both sentences are perhaps somewhat difficult to parse, but also very readable to my eyes.

>Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

Well, I'm not sure where Michel Lotito [0] (aka Monsieur Mangetout) fits w/ this ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Michel_Lotito

huh, seems as if there slipped an addition / in there. Which broke my redirection, but still worked. Which makes me curious as how that happened in the first place.

The nuance of the Dutch translation is slightly wrong, possibly implying eating glass in general doesn't hurt. Just a heads-up for those going to the old archived website in search of medical advice.

If you go by reported pronunciation it says “hij”, doesn’t it? Just don’t text/write it and it will be ok.

I used to play online games at an hour when a lot of Japanese players were online, I asked my sister who was studying Japanese for some phrases to say and this was one of them. Now I know where she got it from! I also used this phrase when I was visiting Australia and met two Japanese guys at a bar, they thought it was hilarious.

“Mi hermano está enfermo pero mis pantalones son rojos.”

This was my favorite bombastic phrase in Spanish—for the same purpose: to be “viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect”

The Mandarin translation is incorrect. The he chose close homophones of the right words, but they have the wrong tones. You can verify this by translating the image back to English.

What are you translating with? Google seems to get the right result by translating "我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体" as "I can swallow glass without hurting myself"

Of course, that doesn't mean Google is correct.

On the archived page he translates it to 我克藝吃玻璃，我不毀受傷。

https://web.archive.org/web/20040203215138/http://hcs.harvar...

我克藝 is the wrong translation of “I can”. 我可以 is correct. They sound similar though.

When I was in Julliard pre-college music school, there was a girl I had a crush on. She was from South Africa and I wanted to impress her. But being 14 years old, I didn’t want to say something cheesy. So I asked my Dutch friends how to say this (it is the same in Afrikaans)…

Beware of the giant chicken! It will eat your hair.

Awesome. I remember this from the early internet. I think from everything2. An older code, but it checks out.

I was just thinking about this the other day; how strange to see that others remember and were thinking the same.

I read the title as grass and got excited...

> Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

If there is anything rambling insane people get it is dignity and respect.

I think this assumes people are more respectful to their own, at least overtly, than to guests, but this is an incomplete view. In cultures where hospitality is high, guests are treated with a hospitality and patience that is not extended to the locals. Furthermore, foreigners are more likely to be viewed as people unfamiliar with the conventions and customs of the region, and therefore some reasonable patience is shown, whereas locals are expected to be on top of such things.

What insane people get isn't dignity and true respect, but avoidance!

Given the context, the probability of that being tongue-in-cheek has to be quite high.

On second thought, keep your tongue away from your cheeks whilst eating glass, lest it get shredded up.

Obviously tongue in cheek but also largely true. Tourists are targets for all kinds of scams. Less so local crazies.

Nobody is actually going to belive an obvious foreigner shouting a crazy phrase in accented local language is actually a local, but they still may steer clear and scam someone else (if this was meant to be taken seriously, it obviously isn't).

There's that "real Ghostbusters" cartoon where the street toughs ask Egon what he's doing and he said something about ectoplasm or whatever, and one of the toughs asks the leader why he left him alone and he says 'I don't mess with anyone weirder than me"

> Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

Since context is such an important part of many languages, this almost guarantees no one will understand you unless you have perfect pronunciation

I had tons of friends who could do this literally in primary school (Nigeria) .. and it was normal. It's funny the things you pick up as a kid in Nigeria that people look at you in amazement when you do it. For instance, the awes I get when I crack open a beer bottle with my teeth. Granted every kid in Nigeria could do this (soda bottles) since they were 6.

Come to think of it I'm now curious how this is possible. With cracking open bottle tops, it is all leverage (not strength, power, or some physical gift) but I would think chewing glass has got to be some special type of skill or physical ability. I didn't have a curious mind for it then since I didn't think it was a special skill although I did not dare try it as it seemed to me as dangerous as it sounded

All fun and games until a piece lodges in your throat. A lot of professional performers mostly count on things sitting right, and then die when they don't. E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirin_Dajo

Then again, there's Stevie Starr, who's passed the ripe old age of 60, and still going strong with swallowing and regurgitating all manner of crazy stuff: https://youtu.be/WVVLyZKtIbI?si=sFDuCGXpdO-CbP8K

Seems pretty hard without teleportation as your mouth is closed when doing this mostly.

> For instance, the awes I get when I crack open a beer bottle with my teeth.

People might be in awe because they are thinking about what it does to your teeth.

Once I met a young man who was able to eat glass, literally. I saw, right in front of me, him break a glass with his teeth, chew the pieces until they were very fine, and swallow everything. To prove that he wasn't hiding the pieces in his mouth, he made a point of opening his mouth wide and showing that he had indeed swallowed them.

Given that you don't mention seeing blood, this was almost certainly just someone playing a prank by eating sugar glass. It's slightly thickened melted sugar that you've let set into a thin pane. Looks just like glass, but it's really rock candy and so you can break it up and chew it.

https://www.inthekitchenwithmatt.com/edible-sugar-glass

No. It was a glass from the bar, and a thick walled one. There was no blood. He did this thing several times. He did not die, as I met him several years after. It is a glass like this one, common in Brazilian bars:

https://youtu.be/xwrn2h8iAdw

I'd still think it's more likely it was a magic trick or scam.

There are a lot of people who do this, amazing and unbelievable as it may seem.

https://youtu.be/WUuMybRysjE

https://youtu.be/O8ifaTHbMTo

https://youtu.be/JFnGsGnlkAI

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5OdkhtMEqMo?feature=share

There are probably some types of glass that work better for it than others. I only looked at two of the videos and they were both a guy in Brazil eating a very particular type of drinking glass, which has me thinking these guys aren't just wolfing down pint glasses in UK pubs or something -- this is one particular glass that they 'can' pull this off with.

It would take a bit of finesse and the right mouth for it, but as long as you didn't surprise your soft bits with sudden movement across or into a sharp piece... maybe?

Maybe. It doesn't sound completely physically impossible, but it's like...even if you could do it, why wouldn't you just use sugar glass or some other trick? Infinitely safer and more fun for the same result.

You probably mean a Copo Americano (American Glass) [1]. Also note, that eating glass is also a common magic trick, David Blaine is famous for doing it [2], I'm not sure how real is the glass though

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copo_americano

[2]: https://youtu.be/MewROa1EU_o?si=Vysz1UfyWV44AEd_&t=83

With only minor collusion with the bartender, you can just arrange to be given a glass made of sugar-glass.

https://www.makeyourownmolds.com/how-to-sugar-glass-mold/

I have seen enough amazing sleight of hand and trickery that I just always assume there's something I'm not seeing. One would be hard pressed to prove to me alone that they are eating real broken proper glass.

If,say, Penn & Teller were in the room with me witnessing the effect yp close and said "actually I think that's legit" then, maybe. I'd give it some benefit of doubt. But I've learned my humility when it comes to limits of my observational capabilities and knowledge of magic tricks / what to look for.

So why I 100% believe that's what you saw, I approximately 0% believe that's what happened :-/

(that being said, if they chewed it very very very well, then.. Maybe? But basically I'd need external verification for anything that's susceptible to sleight of hand and other trickery, especially street performances where I know I'm massively out gunned :-)

"Eat Lightbulbs Without Getting Hurt": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbpCw5ZnP5o

Swallowing ground glass is not actually all that dangerous. [1] The trick would be in chewing carefully, without your mouth becoming a bloody mess. Seems doable, maybe, though I don't feel any urge to try it any time soon. :-)

[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ground-glass-deadly/

I asked chatgpt the following:

   Please translate the sentence  "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" into 50 different languages. Include a pronunciation guide for English speakers for each.

And was not disappointed at all.

insane -> dignity, respect

Dignity and respect result from fear. Who would you fear most between the tourist and the insane?

Well, yeah, that's the joke; it's not actually supposed to be a useful resource, but something fun and silly

Enoch Root wants to borrow your bicycle.

I think it's supposed to be a joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com