He comfortable! He quickly dry!
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A neighbor of mine, a respectable woman retired from medical practice, set a number of friends of hers a one-question quiz this week. The puzzle was to identify an item she recently purchased, based solely on what was stated on the tag attached to it. The tag said this (I reproduce it carefully, preserving the strange punctuation, line breaks, capitalization, and grammar, but replacing two searchable proper nouns by xxxxxxxx because they might provide clues):
ABOUT xxxxxxxx
He comfortable
He elastic
He quickly dry
He let you unfettered experience and indulgence. Please! Hurry up
No matter where you are. No matter what you do.
Let xxxxxxxx Change your life,
Become your friends, Partner,
Part of life
I was completely baffled. He comfortable? What is this, African American vernacular? I had no hope of identifying the product, so my entry in the competition was designed purely for laughs. It was "unfettered experience and indulgence" that did it. I proposed that it must have been a comfortable, flexible, quick-drying sex toy. Possibly a life-sized inflatable man doll.
I wasn't hoping to be anywhere near correct, but to my astonishment I won the prize. Not because I was correct, but because other people couldn't even make a guess, and I did, hence I made the closest guess. (If m < n, and there is no k such that m < k < n, then m is the closest to n.)
You're probably thinking that I will now reveal to you what the product actually was, or at least leave comments open so that you can discuss it and criticize each other's guesses.
How little you know me.
I'll tell you one thing, though: manufacturers should really stop thinking that free online translation tools are 100% trustworthy, and that whatever such a program may output is immediately ready, without any checking by a human native speaker, to be printed on tags, boxes, products, instruction leaflets, or advertisements.