Nope, ankle scarves are not the latest thing to come out of Italy or Germany or wherever. I was skeptical when I came across this Country Living article that declared them a "trend," as the image is clearly Photoshopped. So, I started digging. First I went to its source, an Italian website called Lercio. Then I clicked to Lercio's source, a German site called Der Postillon and that's when I knew my suspicions were true. Ankle scarves are fake news parading around on English sites as a real trend.

And that's when I came across this article on Lifehacker. Its author, Nick Douglas, breaks it down for us:

That’s because there is no ankle scarf trend. I’m not saying that there’s really only one person who once wore tiny scarves on their ankles. I’m saying that the photo comes from this joke article on the German satire site Der Postillon.

See, Der Postillon published a joke article that teens in Berlin are wearing scarves around their ankles, to stay warm while wearing fashionably short pants. Then the Italian satire site Lercio syndicated that article. Lercio isn’t pretending to be real any more than Der Postillon is; the front page includes stories about a hermit hiding inside his mailbox, and the pope fighting over parking spots for the Popemobile.

When a blogger for the American site BestProducts.com—not a satire site—picked up the ankle scarf story, she either failed to notice that it was satire, or decided that it would make a better story if she didn’t mention that part.

In an emergency situation, it's important to get life-saving information out to the people. Deaf residents of Manatee County, Florida may not have received this message clearly, as a man with limited sign language skills was put in front of the camera to translate a televised briefing about Hurricane Irma.

To show just how embarrassingly bad the translation really was, YouTuber Jane Smith added captions to the briefing.

As an example, "We need you to be safe," became "Need be bear monster" to this under-qualified interpreter.

One YouTube commenter defended the man, writing:

ma'am he was not impersonating an interpreter. I personally know him and he is not an interpreter nor does he claim to be. His brother is Deaf. He works for the county as marine rescue. THE county are the ones who are to blame not this man. For the record his superiors asked him to, and he told them that he was not an interpreter and did not want to, but he was coerced into doing it anyways. Yes, it was a serious mistake, but please direct your outrage appropriately and don't just make assumptions about someone's motives without knowing anything about them please...

Poor guy, he really gave it his best shot.

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