Danny Yee points to a stunning example of what most of the blog commenters think is a machine (or possibly rote dictionary) translation gone awry.

I’ve written about this before: What is it about this that makes me break up? I vividly recall my fifth grade elementary school teacher introducing us to Mad Libs (or whatever they were called in the mid-70s), and finding that I was the only student in the room falling out of my seat. The rest were amused, or laughing at how hard I was laughing, but they surely didn’t have the same experience I did.

It’s a strange sensation, I suddenly realize. Like some other people with tickling, I cannot withstand these things, these wrong-word amusements. There’s something very neurophysiological-feeling about it. I am having a different experience from that of the merely funny: neither the surreal juxtaposition, nor the embarrassing gaffe, nor the comic ridicule is what I am responding to. It sends me into a different mental state from all those. Really. No better words to describe it. If I were a little more synaesthetic, I would be willing to insist it’s a different position of mood from the others. (Actually, it may be the best evidence I have that I experience some language-associated synaesthesia).

I wonder how, short of an MRI, we could explore that weird sensation.