Okay, one more...
I thought I was done with the McSweeney's lists, but then I saw this one, which made me laugh out loud. All you ESL teachers would appreciate it. Honestly, the third and fourth ones...leave me helpless in their wake.

This reminds me of what happened with my co-worker, Brett, in Beijing. He had assigned his class to write letters to themselves when their English course with him started, in which they should detail what they hoped to acheive in the duration of the course. I think that Brett had told his students that he wouldn't read their letters--that they would be private--but eventually he opened them up and read them anyway. This was a class made up of PhD or graduate students...the point is that they were older. Anyway, there was one student whose chosen English name was Horse. He was in several of Brett's classes, so Brett was pretty familiar with him, and looked out for Horse's letter in the batch. When he found it, he discovered that Horse's letter to himself read:

Dear Monkey,

....

I love that--no explanation or anything, but that seemed to be Horse's pet name for himself.

On another note, Brett had another student whose English name was Fishermen (plural), and he had a sidekick who Brett nicknamed "Fishermen's Friend," which cracked me up.

And finally, Suzi had one student in her class who wanted her English name to be Tinky-Winky, after the Teletubby. I can't remember if she actually went through with it or not, though! Let's hope so.