In my Portuguese class we were given this ambiguous phrase as a riddle:

"Maria toma banho porque sua mãe disse ela traga a toalha."

We had to make those words make sense only by adding punctuation and without changing the order of any words. Can you figure it out?

For those who don't speak Portuguese, the phrase above translates to: "Maria takes a bath because her mom said to her bring the towel." Doesn't make much sense!

The trick is that "sua," which means "her" when the following noun is feminine, is also the present third-person singular of the verb "suar," meaning "to sweat." Thus, with a few commas and quotation marks, it suddenly makes sense:

Maria toma banho porque sua. "Mãe," disse ela, "traga a toalha."

=

Maria takes a bath because she sweats. "Mom," she said, "bring the towel."

Not nearly as ambiguous as the "had had had had" example, but a similar lesson regarding the need for punctuation.

Edit: as personlurking pointed out, suar is "to sweat," not (as I put originally) "to smell." Thanks for catching that!