Eight-year-old ghetto kid: Mama, give me your cell phone! I gotta call my girlfriend.
Mother: What you gonna talk to her about? How you can't read and write? Tell her to help you with that!
–Harlem
Overheard by: Joe
Eight-year-old ghetto kid: Mama, give me your cell phone! I gotta call my girlfriend.
Mother: What you gonna talk to her about? How you can't read and write? Tell her to help you with that!
–Harlem
Overheard by: Joe
Buff dude #1: Hey, guy.
Smart guy: What’s up?
Buff dude #1: Can you settle something? Is Portugal in Europe or South America?
Smart guy: Uh, it’s in Europe.
Buff dude #1: See?
Buff dude #2: Okay, okay. But, like, the Portuguese they speak in South America — that’s not the same language as they speak in South America, right?
Smart guy: Actually, it is. Brazil was settled by the Portuguese, and the Spanish got the rest of South America, which is why they speak Spanish in the other countries that aren’t Brazil.
Buff dude #2: Oooh! Look who passed his geography class!
–Exodus Gym, Union & Metropolitan, Williamsburg
Yuppie: I was just teaching the scientific method to my students.
Nerd: Oh, so you teach them induction and deduction?
Yuppie: [long pause] The students aren’t that smart so I don’t teach them big words like those.
— Party, Manhattan
Professor in stuffy room: Someone open a window.
Student: We're on the fifth floor; they don't open.
Professor: I don't understand why they don't unlock them. No one is going to kill themselves. We're not NYU.
–Columbia University
Chick #1: I didn’t get into any of the colleges on the east coast I applied to. I’m so bummed.
Chick #2: But you got into Miami — that’s pretty cool.
Chick #1: But that’s not on the east coast. I’m going to have to get a passport and some crazy shots to go there.
–W 10th & Bleecker
NYU dude #1: What sources did you use for the final?
NYU dude #2: Urbandictionary.com.
NYU dude #1: Awesome.
–Washington Square South
Overheard by: Lezbotron
Question girl: Well, if the sky is only blue when the sun is shining on it, then how come the Earth looks blue when they take pictures from the Moon?
Professor: Well, that's probably because of all the water.
–Borough of Manhattan Community College
Chick #1: I don't get it. I mean, why would you go to Cambridge to study science? Why not go to Oxford?
Chick #2: Either way, it's England, so it's mad awesome.
–Penn Station
Overheard by: Jedusor
Nerd #1: From the way you talk about LISP, I think you went to MIT. Did you?
Nerd #2: Yes, I did!
— Union Square Park
Student: I tried to write my Spanish essay but I don’t know how to say “bitch” in Spanish.
Professor: You live in New York and you don’t even know that?
–Brooklyn College
Overheard by: Guy