And then we have the phrase “He buys a pink sheet for a kiss”. Pink is another word for pee and buys and sheet (slightly mispronounced) sound like two words meaning poo (well, so does sheet in English as well).
A cousin of min once rented a house in England and her BIL made certain that her landlady, who went by the name of Pippa, knew that it means fuck in Swedish.
I heard a radio stunt some years back – it might have been Howard Stern, but I’m not certain. This was when Bob Dole was running for president against Bill Clinton. Someone had told the morning zoo squad that “Dole” sounded exactly like the Farsi word for male genitalia. To test this bit of trivia, they called up a Farsi-language newspaper and asked the lady who answered whether it was true. The lady quickly hung up. After several more attempts, the line was picked up by a man who would neither confirm nor deny what “Dole” might translate to in Farsi, but who had many harsh words to say about the deplorable manners employed by the callers.
The English word “peach” means “bastard” in Turkish. Turkey has an insult law. Turkish “sheftali” vendors did NOT like you calling their fruit a bastard, and we were told they could have you arrested for saying it. Sheftali was the first Turkish word we were taught (in the airport during the welcome speech no less)
The German-based Fücker Travel Company puts its name on its tour buses all over Europe.
In bahasa, the language of Malaysia and Indonesia, the word for stinky is “bau”, pronounced almost exactly like the English word “bow” as in “take a bow”. “Tai” (tie) means “shit”, so be careful wearing a bowtie around your neck.
David Letterman once got a lot of mileage out of discussing a political scandal involving the Fokker aircraft company.
When I was living in Poland I got a sweet little cat and named her Suki. Little did I know that ‘suki’ means ‘bitch’ in Polish (both in the way of a female dog and also a mean woman). The people thought I was pretty weird for naming my cat that.
And in Russian it’s something like “succah”… which is also the booth the observant Jews build during the holiday of Succot.
My friend tells me she was once with some Russian-speaking people during the holiday, and their succah collapsed. Or maybe it was someone else’s, who didn’t speak Russian… I don’t remember all the details. It’s been a long time. The punchline involved a girl running over to them and saying, “There’s a topless succah in our yard!”
I heard that “fanny,” which is your rear end in the States, refers to a strictly female part across the pond. Anyone from the UK confirm/deny? If it’s true I would certainly call them “belly bags” instead of “fanny packs,” and the title of the book Fanny Hill would certainly be more humorous.
I wouldn’t worry much about sound alikes (unless you want to name a product or so, some famous mistakes exist), but cultural language differences can be difficult or dangerous.
Just an example: in Turkey, calling someone (distant) “my brother” is about the same as calling him a bastard, since you would have the same mother, and yet not know him (your"brother")
If you call a policeman “my brother” while negociating a traffic ticket, as you could do in Marocco for instance, you would be immediatly arrested. (personal experience about 15 years ago)
Generally speaking, yes.
The British equivalent would be “bum bag,” “bum” being the British term for what Americans call the butt or fanny.
Car means dick in Albanian.
The German word “Mist” is roughly equivalent to “crap”. It’s a pretty versatile word.
And according to the slang dictionary I picked to check I was right on the above, apparently “Latte” means “boner”. Never heard it used, though.
“After” means anus in German, if highschool memories serve well.
Is Australia foreign enough? Because here in the states, even a nice young lady might root for her favorite team, by cheering them on. In Australia, that would mean something rather different…
“Yep” (and some pronunciations of “yup”) sounds exactly like the Russian imperative form of “fuck” as in “go fuck [yourself/your mother/your dog/Stalin/etc]”
Brazilians get a kick out of the English expression “sea food” because it sounds quite close to “go f— yourself” in Portuguese.
“Pennies” sounds like “penis” in Portuguese (and Spanish I assume), so a trip to Penny’s (JCPenny) always evokes a little giggle.
“Cassette” sounds similar to a rude word for the same organ.
The term “chin-chin” is a child’s word for penis in Japanese.
Which makes the English version of the **Three Little Pigs ** quite amusing to little Japanese boys.
Barney, a friend of mine back in grad school, was a fluent German speaker, and being a soft-spoken guy who’d rather gnaw off a limb than be a source of offense, found himself in a distinctly uncomfortable situation one day.
We were sitting in my office cubicle during lunch, surfing the web, and came across a site we found pretty damned amusing. As was his habit, Barney expressed his enthusiasm for it in German, using a word pronounced pretty like the English word “guile.” I’d heard him say it often enough, and he’d told me that it was a slang term that essentially translated to cool, wicked, awesome, et al.
Much to his dismay, the lady in the next cubicle (who had just started working there that morning) happened to be German herself, and possessed a strict sense of workplace propriety. As it turns out, while the word geil is used by German youngsters in just the way Barney had defined it to me, it also means lusty or horny. Barney spent the next twenty minutes apologizing profusely.
There is a large construction company in Sydney whose headquarters with a huge sign always
attracts French ( and other Francophile) tourists and their cameras.
Its name: " Grocon."