I can eat glass, it does not hurt me

In 1996, Harvard student Ethan Mollick created a website dedicated to translating one completely useless sentence into as many languages as possible: “I can eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me.”

The logic was that tourists usually learn practical phrases, like “Where’s the bathroom?”, which immediately expose them as outsiders. Mollick argued that saying something completely useless and absurd in the local language like “I can eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me”, would instead make you seem like “an insane native” and perhaps even earn some respect.

The website collected more than 150 translations, including invented languages and programming languages. You could browse them through a clickable world map or submit new translations yourself. A perfect artifact of the early internet: an obscure idea taken very seriously.

The original website disappeared in 2004, but you can still see it on the Wayback Machine. The Kermit Project also kept some original translations.