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?
This happens within English too… I’m a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a “conservative” risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.
And here I initially thought politics when I heard climate change and conservative in the same sentence. As in, “Climate change is not seen as a risk to conservatives.”
“Conservatives believe it’s caused by earth’s natural processes, therefore in order to explain the results we’re seeing please consult vulcanologists and geologists because apparently it’s multiple apocalyptic events not just the one”
An opposite thing happened to me.
Wanted to trade something online. The other party listed trade as currency for object or other object + currency for object.
I had the other object and thought they would pay me the currency and their object for mine. It took a while for me to understand what they were waiting for.
They seemed to be a native English speaker. It’s a second language for me, so some meanings get lost in translation.
One of my 2 am cringe memories involves loudly asking my 3rd grade classmates if anyone would like a kiss.
I meant the chocolate.
I also had a fun experience in Belgium where a guy at a bar approached me and we each just tried different languages until we landed on one that we both knew. (I know this is common in Europe but you don’t run into this in North America as often)
Have a coworker who regularly says “Choca my life,” to brush off little annoyances. He’ll also say “Choca your life” in a sing-song gallows humor way to express sympathy for annoyances other are going through.
Anyway, I had just started at the job and we were having a Thanksgiving lunch where everyone was going to bring a dish. I was going to bring a Sopapilla Cheesecake and he was excited about it, but the night before the meal when I went to turn the oven on it wouldn’t heat up (turned out to be a bad breaker).
The next morning I’m telling the story and appologizing for not bringing the desert, and he comes up and says “Choca your life!”, which I hadn’t heard him say before.
What I heard was “Choke on your lies!”
I was thinking this guy was serious about his cheesecake.
My argentenian friend called stuffed crust pizza “the pizza with cheese borders”.
Still call it that almost 20 years later.
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!”
They’re both wrong, it’s the electricity that kills you. Light and sound are just side effects.
Okay, but try telling that to the people who came up with the words a thousand years ago.
This is fascinating to learn.
One time when I was a kid,
That’s how childhood and passage of time works.
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.
Never really though about it but there are similar words in German “poppen” (colloquial term for having sex) and “pupsen” which is farting.
I love that in my head im reading “poepen” as “poopin’” with a funny accent
Geef me een klap, papa
Lol this reminds me of BBC Pidgin:
Hey, don’t judge the Belgians.
We visited an office, and the person guiding us around told us about one of the employees that “it is his first day” - we all misheard this as “it is his birthday”. And started to sing…
I was snowboarding with some French exchange students. They used a lot of slang. On the chair lift we saw somebody fall hard and flat, what we might call a “yard sale”. One of them said “Quelle bordelle”. I asked what it means he said “what a mess”. Later that year, my parents also had a French exchange student, and his parents were visiting and they didn’t speak much English. We were at the beach and I was describing all the seaweed from the storm and of course it’s a mess on the beach. His mom was a bit puzzled when I described the seaweed as resembling a brothel. You know, a mess, like trash, refuse, rubbish.
I was selling a TV to a guy who barely spoke English. The TV was $50. He said “I only have fifteen monies”. Idk why, but that was so hilarious to me that I let him have the TV for fifteen monies.
A student was telling me about their pet dog, but it sounded like “duck.” I kept asking questions like, “how did you get a duck? Your parents bought you a duck?” They couldn’t tell the difference between what I was saying either. They showed me a picture and that cleared right up.
Me. A white boy teenager.
My best friend. Child of first gen Chinese immigrants. Fluent in Cantonese and English. Compared to his parents, he is very westernized. Can I call him a Twinkie? I mean, we aren’t friends anymore, but that seems like an “our word” kind of word, and that’s not mine.
Anyway…His parents own a Chinese restaurant. He gets me a job there in high school.
One day, my friend calls to me by my full name. One of the chefs hears it and repeats it to confirm what he heard.
It’s at that point, dear reader, that my friend realizes that, if said with a Cantonese inflection, my last name sounds exactly like a common vulgarity of that tongue.
I won’t say what it is, because it’s a pretty uncommon name. But I will say that for several weeks after that, every single time I walked into the kitchen, I’d be greeted by all the cooks like Norm walking into Cheers.
Can I call him a Twinkie
The asian term for it is ‘banana’. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. (Before the pitchforks come out, I’m one myself).
As a black guy I’ve been called “Oreo” for the same reasoning.
It’s coconut for Indians and South Asians.
day 2 at a new job
Boss’s boss and I are the only two there.
Boss^2: Vhat is za status of our new office in Catalina
Me: O.o (They have offices all over the place but I am not aware it’s someplace named Catalina exists, I’ve heard of the dressing before so maybe it’s a thing?)
I…um I’m not sure
Boss^2: Well, you need to find out.
Me: I don’t even have anybody’s phone number yet this is just my second day if you have some people you’d like me to call I can do that.
Boss^2: yez, look up the office and call them and ask them what their status is.
Me: (starts googling Catalina, an island in California? That wouldn’t make any sense. A region in Spain Catalonia? That would make a little more sense but still not a lot and I don’t speak Spanish)
Boss^2: well?
Me: I can’t find an office in Catalina or Catalonia. You wouldn’t happen to have their phone number would you
Boss^2: Catalina, Catalina, CAT-O-LINA, sea ate aya oh lee n ya
Me: Wait, Carolina, I’m so sorry let me find them.
(Rings, voicemail) It’s 8:00 a.m., there’s no one there yet.
Boss^2: rrr o k
Sounds like you don’t know shit. (Standup comedy >4min)
Also your comment made me think of Jimmy Yang, who apparently knew English when he moved to the US, but not that well, not knowing any expressions. When someone asked him “what’s up”, he just looked at the ceiling.
As a kid we giggled at “Disney Home Video” because “Disney” is a proper noun, so doesn’t translate, and “video” is “video” in Finnish as well, but “home” means “mould”, (as in the fungus.)
Loose fit, but my family lived in Australia for a few years. We’re German. One night, my dad feels like a shake after a long drive to a vacation spot, so he drives up to a McDonald’s and orders, the rest of the family dozing in the car.
“One erdber shake, please.”
“Excuse me?”
“One erdber shake, please?”
“… I don’t understand.”
At this point my mum realized.
“Oh, a strawberry shake!”
We all have a bit of a laugh. He said the German word for strawberry, but pronounced it English. None of us in the car realized and we all understood. The lady in the drive through said she thought they invented a new flavor she didn’t know about.
He also swaps the th and s in Thous Australia. :)
