An example of what I mean:
I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to “take a shit.”
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.
I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.
I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, “wouldn’t that be giving a shit?”
I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.
What misunderstandings made you laugh?
One time when I was a kid, we went on a long car trip and a thunderstorm approached. My dad said, “Don’t worry about the sound. It’s the light that kills you!” My Japanese mom was not cool with this. “No, it’s the sound. What are you talking about?” A fierce argument ensued.
So, the words for thunder and lightning in Japanese are kaminari and inazuma, respectively. But that’s not a perfect translation. kaminari means something like “peal of the gods”, and is the forceful, dangerous part. inazuma is basically just a light show.
English is the opposite. Thunder is just a sound, while lightning can kill you. To put it another way, in English, one word is light + electricity while the other is sound. In Japanese, one word is sound + electricity while the other is light.
Anyway, I was about to speak up when my big brother tugged my arm. “No. This is a popcorn moment. Don’t ruin it!”
This is fascinating to learn.
They’re both wrong, it’s the electricity that kills you. Light and sound are just side effects.
One time when I was a kid,
That’s how childhood and passage of time works.
Years ago, when I first moved to America from the UK, I was working in a pretty quiet office that backed on to a field. One day mouse appeared, freaked out a couple of the gals in the office, and then it ran and hid under an office cube.
I investigated to see where it was hiding, but it was pretty dark down there. So I asked if either of the gals had a torch. They both got an expression of wide-eyed horror, which confused me for a few seconds.
Then I realized that torch had a different term in America. So I corrected myself and asked if either of them had a flashlight. And they looked very relieved. They thought I was going to get an old school torch and try to smoke the mouse out or set it on fire, and probably set the whole cube on fire in the process.
I was in North Carolina for work recently and one lady was talking about her local brewery where she could “grab her growler” and head over there. Took me a while to recover from laughing at that one.
I means a bottle for transporting beer here, I’m guessing like all British slang it means genitalia?
Oh of course yeah, if it doubt then it is a safe bet to assume that. From a 2003 entry in urban dictionary:
- Growler
Female pubic region, having gone into a state of repair/part of male mating call
Get your growler out
Only Growler I have is from a brewpub that doesn’t exist anymore. They did gangbusters business in a walkable downtown area selling pints over the bar. They decided to move across town to the part where pedestrians never go to focus on retail sales of packaged beer and were out of business within 6 months.
What does that mean to you?
From a 2003 entry in urban dictionary:
- Growler
Female pubic region, having gone into a state of repair/part of male mating call
Get your growler out
Is growler not used in the US the same way? It’s a style of jug in Canada most often for beer, wine or cider
I think so but I’m not American, I’m British
It is used that way here, yes. I’m not familiar with any other meaning.
Maybe they thought you were accepting the classic introductory RPG quest?
Gotta get that xp somehow.
Thank god you didn’t ask them if you could borrow a rubber.
UK English: Eraser.
US English: Condom.
Haha, yeah. Pretty sure I would have been summoned to have a chat with HR in that case.
At least you didn’t ask to bum a fag
Not a single Jonathan who has been through the UK school system in the past forty years has gotten away with being asked “Have you got a rubber, Johnny?”
Not one.
I made this comment about a year ago: https://midwest.social/comment/6247683
“A friend of mine is a non-native English speaker. He teaches at an elementary school and works with ‘English as a second language’ students. He casually mentioned that he always tells his students to take a ‘horse bath’ in the bathroom sink after recess if needed. He was traumatized when I told him that he’d misheard that phrase for his entire adult life.”
What’s the real phrase?
Whores bath. It’s when you hit up the bathroom to freshen your junk before you get busy
Bruh .ml censores the urls too
Wow, that’s insanity. I don’t particularly like the word, but come on.
The censor hits any substring, rather than trying to heuristically guess whether the substring is being used as a slur or not, it assumes users are smart enough to pick up on the context.
“Whore bath” is how I’ve heard it
People are trying to post the answer and it’s getting censored lol. The term is “core’s bath,” but replace the “c” with “wh”.
It isn’t censored on most instances.
#JustDotMLProblems
Lemmy.ml censors the word “whore”???
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/crates/utils/src/utils/slurs.rs#L78
Line 78 has the regex for Lemmy’s profanity filter. The .ml instance has it enabled, .world and most others I’ve seen do not.
I’m quite impressed by the elaborate regex for the n word
ni((g{2,}|q)+|[gq]{2,})[e3r]+(s|z)?
I mean, I can kinda understand it - socialists/communists/anarchists generally prefer ‘sex worker’, because ‘whore’ has some pretty terrible connotations due to being used as a slur for so long.
But still, censoring it instead of just deleting/blocking the handful of pricks who still say it as an insult seems… well, par for the course for .ml tbh
I don’t understand it at all when it’s not nearly as bad as some of the shit that gets said on there.
Pretty pathetic that they feel the need to censor words
What a bunch of pricks
So he wanted to tell them to clean up their junk, but mixed up the phrase?
He thought a “horse bath” was just a quick rinse off in the sink. He was inadvertently teaching ESL elementary school kids the phrase “whore’s bath” which, while it is technically just a quick rinse in the sink, there is definitely different connotation.
just a quick rinse off in the sink
Bird bath, sparrow bath, crow bath. Terms in some Indian languages for that.
I used to work with a Ukranian coworker, who had so little of an accent that I often forgot he was not a native English speaker.
One time during a meeting, I mentioned “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” and I can still picture the horrified look on his face when he processed what I just said.
In all fairness, it’s a pretty morbid expression!
I have a Moldovan friend who does have a thick accent and had a lot of trouble saying “beach” and “beaches” for a bit.
Once he found out why people were laughing, he decided to keep saying he “loved going to Florida for the bitches” anyway.
My Dutch friend. We were on discord playing guild wars and the topic of alcohol came up. The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
There was a bit of silence before he said, “I don’t know, William of Orange?”. Turns out he had never heard of the word ‘spirit’ to refer to high proof alcohol before so selected a famous historical dutch figure.
I could imaging a William of Orange rum. Bet it would taste pretty good.
The answer, of course is “jenever”.
The funnier answer is “witte wieven”
The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up “so what famous dutch spirits are there?”.
In case you want an actual answer to that question, look up the history of gin.
This was a rather long time ago, my gin and oude en jonge jenever collection has rather grown since then lol
As I’m half Arab/half European, my Arabian family tried to talk my native language. One of them wanted to say “I love you” which is in Dutch “Ik hou van je”.
He ended up saying; “ik geil van je” which translates along the likes of “I get horny of you”.
Had a good laugh but was bit odd to explain lol.
Kinda reminds me of how in Spanish, it’s common to say “te quiero” as a sweet, friendly way of telling someone you love them.
Of course it translates literally as “I want you”, which sounds SO SEXUAL in English 😂
Also in Spanish, you want to say “Tengo calor” = “I have heat” instead of “Estoy caliente” = “I am hot”, because the latter is used to mean “I am horny”.
My Spanish teacher also told us of a time he had taken a class to a Spanish speaking country and a student accidentally broke a glass while in a restaurant. The student wanted to exclaim “I am very embarrassed!”, but used a false cognate and instead exclaimed “Estoy muy embarazada!” = “I am very pregnant!”
Lol I’m pretty sure Peggy Hill did that one too 😂
Also in Spanish, you want to say “Tengo calor” = “I have heat” instead of “Estoy caliente” = “I am hot”, because the latter is used to mean “I am horny”.
Lmao this explains so much, thank you
Ah dutch.
I’ve heard someone translate “dat is geweldig” not with the correct “that is amazing” but “that is like violence”, which shows amazing skill in Dutch grammar, but a tiny lack in knowing words.
For those not fluent:
“Geweldig” means “Amazing”, but “geweld” means “violence”. Meanwhile, most words that end in “-ig” are nouns used as adjectives, like “fun” -> “funny”.
Similar thing happened to me with the Spanish speaking coworkers Lol. I wanted to ask a new guy his name (but trying not to say “¿como te llamas?” Which means "how are you called?) and accidentally asked for his number.
Nombre ≠ numero
I had an ESL coworker make a similar mistake to me. Mixing up name-nombre/number-numero goes both ways.
geil = horny
is that the origin of the German word?
The Dutch word “poepen” (taking a shit), is a Belgian euphemism for sex. Which is always a great source of fun when making friends near the southern border.
I love that in my head im reading “poepen” as “poopin’” with a funny accent
Lol this reminds me of BBC Pidgin:
How is that headline about the woman and not the british man she invited over who threw poop out her second floor window?
Geef me een klap, papa
I was once working with a team in India to resolve a database issue. During a particular call, we had to export data several times to create backups. Exporting the DB data is done with “dump” commands and my Indian counterpart would repeatedly tell me that he “took a dump just now”.
The taking/giving/reaching out term differences between Indian dialect and American English caused me some confusion on one of my calls. They kept saying they were trying to “take RDP from” server A to server B. I interpreted that as connecting from A to B, since they used the word “from.”
It took a bit, but I eventually realized that there seemed to be to be a fundamental difference in the way these things are thought about.
Americans, we always are reaching toward, pointing to, connecting to, or connecting something from HERE to THERE, like we’re shooting a gun or drawing a line. That is not how these Indian guys were looking at it.
If you are “taking RDP from” server A to server B, then that means you are on server B trying to connect to server A. It’s more like if you were to imagine reaching out with your hand and grabbing something toward you.
This is super interesting and I often wonder how differences in thought patterns, as they relate to a language, affect the culture of the language speakers themselves.
Do those speaking that dialect have like a cultural feeling that they need to “take” or “receive” or otherwise “acquire” a thing (like RDP) to make a connection? This as opposed to what I see as a very american way of looking at things (again using RDP as an example here), where “we’ve already got it, so will give it to you to make the connection.”
It feels like, and I could be very wrong, one comes from a place of not being accustomed to already having what they need, vs taking for granted the things they have and “sending it forth” or whatever.
Hahaha, I’m using this in the future, just for laughs.
Lol. I would always reply with something like “That’s nice, but did you also take a backup?” or “During the call???”.
I had sort of the reverse, working with German-speaking coworkers. I used the term “schpiel” to refer to a long talk I was going to give. This led to a moment of confusion because that’s not what the word means in German. It means “game” or “play” and in the context they thought I meant to imply that I was not taking the speech seriously, or maybe wasn’t going to be completely honest. Almost like a con. That’s probably how the loanword first entered the English language, and its meaning has drifted over time.
The word spiel “schpiel” is of Yiddish origin. It comes from the Yiddish word shpil (שפּיל), which means “play” or “game” same as German.
Yiddish and German are like Spanish and Portuguese. They are of course different languages, but there is a lot of overlap in vocabulary. I don’t know which language was the vector for the word.
I went to Mexico and told a lot of people that they don’t speak Spanish. When someone said something that I couldn’t hear well, I’d compliment their digestion.
Right phrase: No hablo Español (I don’t speak Spanish)
What I said: No hablas Español (you don’t speak Spanish)Right phrase: Que dices (What you say)
What I said Que diges (what digestion!)This is really funny. I assume those people had a good laugh? But why did nobody tell you?
Because people are super accommodating in non-WASPy countries. I’d try to speak Spanish and if they saw I was struggling too much, they’d say “let’s speak English.”
I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.
The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.
Took some time for them to realize “tabling” an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK
Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.
No foreign language, but still.
How the turn tables
it’s worse when you do speak the language, but your laziness in one language affects the other: in spanish, if you leave out the punctuation like it’s english, you could accidentally end up texting people that your potato is into anal gangbangs instead of into how much your dad likes new years parties. lol
mi papa disfruta fiestas por ano neuvo (my potato likes new anal gangbangs)
vs
mi papá disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (my father likes new years parties)
Oh I think we have a winner….
Mi papa disfruta fiestas por año nuevo (My potato likes New Year’s parties)
Vs
Mi papá disfruta fiestas por ano nuevo (My father likes new anal gangbangs)
🤣🤣🤣
Well, in European Spanish it would mean “Pope”, not “potato”, so it’s a worthy contender
To be fair, ñ in Spanish is a whole letter by itself and not just a funny n. As in, it has its own entry in the alphabet, and it has a dedicated key on the keyboard. So even lazy people don’t write n instead :P
dedicated key on the keyboard
not on us keyboards; hence all the anal. i literally have to find a source to find ñ and á to copy/paste it. lol
On smartphones you can tap and hold, and on physical keyboards there’s usually an alt key combo you can put in.
on physical keyboards there’s usually an alt key combo you can put in.
they’re disabled and the last time i needed it was years ago; i also didn’t turn it back on to use it back then as well. lol
even on my phone; it’s more convenient to just switch languages than find that character. jeje
As yes, I’ve told someone how many assholes I have before.
My argentenian friend called stuffed crust pizza “the pizza with cheese borders”.
Still call it that almost 20 years later.
Chatting on Skype with a Chinese developer, he said “I need to take Friday off for family matters” and I said “no worries”
He apologized profusely, and eventually I realised that to him, “no worries” meant something like “No! I am very concerned!”
I’ve since taught them some more Australianisms.
So many developers reporting “oy ya cunt”, quite often not even aimed at them as an insult.
Haha I sim race with several Aussies and Kiwis and I’m quite happy to be called a cunt by them because it usually means I won. “'Ow in the fack did yiu get tha leed ya cunt!?”
“cunt” is a term of “endearment” in Australia lol. It’s a cultural clash that needs to be explained quite often. I saw a similar culture clash with polish devs working for a US company. Poles like to vent / complain about their life simply for someone to chime in and say “I feel you, shit sucks”. Once a colleague vented about a minor annoyance. 3 days later we had a meeting scheduled about “problems in the project”. We collectively went “what problems lol”. Everyone was pissing their pants only for the US scrummaster to bring up the tiniest of annoyances as if it meant the end of the world / company.
Haha I know its an endearment, since we’ve all been friends for years now. One thing that got me recently was one of them talking about the new whipper-snipper he just bought and how quiet it was, being electric.
I had no idea what the hell a whipper-snipper was, but know a “whippersnapper” means young person where I’m from.
Turns out a whipper-snipper is the same as a weed-whacker / weed-eater in my part of the world.
That one is also in the states lol.
Slightly morbid academic one.
My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a “frame” around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word “carcass” sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.
