Victory Manual

What’s up with this Engrish I found in the dictionary?
I was checking out a few example uses for かつて, and these grammatically horrid examples popped up:
彼女のかつての友達 = her sometime friend.
What’s a “sometime friend”? I’d have translated it as, “Her on-and-off friend.” At least it’s something you might actually hear being used.
Then there was,
かつての友 [...]

年輪。全てを支配したいサウロンを抵抗するため、年輪のいっぱいエント（木人間）がホビットを手伝った！
多数決。多数決原理がないと、民主主義は無理。
夜明け。夜明け明けましておめでとう。
要点。議院の議員は自分の声があまりにも好きで、長いスピーチが終了しても、最後に要点に触れなかった！(Probably grammatically dubious)
演ずる。1万円をもらうため、演ずる。
演ずる alternate version featuring 親父ギャグ: 演ずる to make えんず meet.
貴族。寂しい貴族は帰属意識がない。かわいいそう。
途端。彼は失業して、塗炭の苦しみを感じた途端に宝くじがあたった！（よかったね）
かつて。かつてかつおを勝手に食った。
からかう。どうして新しい服を買うって、友達が僕のスタイルをからかうから買う。
雇う。野党が夜盗を雇う。（これは全然正当の宣伝ではないよ！ただの記憶術だ。）

幹事の漢字はなかなかいい感じ
The executive secretary’s kanji are pretty decent.
-or-
The kanji for ‘executive secretary’ are pretty decent.

Update: This one works,
両親の教えは良心を形成する。
———————
よく育つと、両親は良心になるものだ。
Does that work grammatically?
両親が良心になることは、よく育ってから。
両親の心が良心になることだ。
Which one of these works best as a mnemonic device? Is there a better way to arrange the information?

Here’s a rather ironic example sentence that I came across in the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar:
私は日本語が話せるどころか、一度も勉強したことがありません。
Translation:
I am far from being able to speak Japanese; I haven’t studied it at all.
That’s a pretty complicated sentence for an absolute beginner with no experience studying the language to be saying in Japanese. It reminded me of [...]

This is just a memory device that popped into my head while studying うちに:
A君：忘れないうちに言っておきたいことがある。
B君：はい。どうぞ。
A君：なんだったっけ…
Translation
A: There’s something I want to tell you before I forget.
B: Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
A: What was it again?
さすがA君！

Let’s look at a few phrases that are useful when you want to get pissed in Japanese. (Here, I mean the American-English ‘pissed’ as in ‘angry’, not the British-English ‘drunk’, although it would be an interesting thing to see someone actually getting drunk on Japanese.)
よくそんなばかなことをしたもんだ！
How could you be such an idiot!
When your friend, in [...]

I continue to realize the existence of problems in English the more I study Japanese.
Of course, I’m sure everyone already knows the problem with the sentence, “The boy watched the girl looking through the telescope.” Was the boy using a telescope to watch the girl? Or was the boy watching a girl who [...]

My wife and I went out to see Charlie Wilson’s War after dinner last night for our wedding anniversary. When we watch movies in English together at home, we usually have Korean subtitles on for her, and the result is that when I describe the scene I watched in English with the same scene [...]

Yet another story of how kanji saved my life…would have sounded a lot more dramatic and probably would have been a more interesting read. But, seriously - Kanji rock. Kanji are superheroes. In fact, in the upcoming 8th season of Smallville (yeah, I watch it - What’s it to you?!), we find [...]