Once upon a time there lived in a village a man who, more than anything else in the world, loved to brag. One day he returned home and said to his wife:
“You won’t believe what kind of snake I saw in the jungle today!” No one has ever come across something like this! Twenty thousand in width, and one hundred and twenty thousand in length!
[Thuoc is a Vietnamese measure of length equal to approximately 43 cm. ]
The wife decided to teach her boastful husband a lesson. She smiled incredulously and said:
- That can’t be true!
- Don’t believe me? Perhaps a hundred and twenty th
- Well, maybe not a hundred, but eighty for sure!
“No,” the wife shook her head, “this can’t be either.”
- Oh, how intractable you are! What if sixty? Will you believe it?
- No.
- Well, forty? - I don’t believe it.
- Okay, I’ll tell you the truth, so be it! The snake was twenty thousand long!
The wife couldn’t stand it and burst out laughing:
- What kind of snake is this? And twenty thousand long, and twenty wide? It turns out your snake is square!
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru