There is an old joke song from the First World War (1914-18) in which the commander sends a message from the front lines back to headquarters by word of mouth.
The message starts off as 'Send reinforcements, we're going to advance' but ends up reaching the generals as 'Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance'.
In Britain/England this is also an old (Victorian) parlour game, called 'Chinese Whispers'. I have never actually encountered this working properly, but the idea is that people pass on a message by whispering it, and see if it changes.
The same principle works for the old schoolboy joke - you walk up to an elderly person who is known to be deaf, and say loudly, 'Do you tickle your arse with a feather?'. When the listener asks you to repeat what you have just said, you say 'Particularly nasty weather'.
I'm fairly sure that I saw this one in a comic book at the age of around eight or nine, when even printing the word 'arse' was not approved of, and I have a vague feeling that the great Scottish cartoon strip writer/artist Dudley D Watkins probably slipped it in un-edited to one of the many strips he created for D C Thomson's comics.
As with the Chinese whispers game, I've never heard it work in practice!
I'm sure all languages have similar jokes.
- David Kilpatrick