What I meant was, she didn’t know that werewolves aren’t hairy with fangs all the time. In other words, she didn’t know about the idea of a human transforming because of a full moon (or whatever).
This came up because she was asked to make a werewolf costume.
Might be from looking at mercator projection maps of the Earth hanging on the wall in school (do they still hang maps on the wall in school?). The north pole is invariably at the top of the map, and the south pole at the bottom.
Hence, north is up, south is down.
Certainly not just French.
My ex-wife is an Asian Indian, and a native Tamil speaker.
I tried to learn that language, and had a lot of trouble with it because I literally don’t hear some of the sounds and shifts. it is ear-training and we all go through it.
As a specific example, the name Rama is both a male and a female name. But it is pronounced differently for males and for females - and I can’t hear the difference.
To vastly exaggerate the difference, for a male, Rama is pronounced with a short a sound on the first a, sort of like the a in the word car. For females, it is pronounced “Ruma” with a short u sound.
But the actual difference is much more subtle than I’ve made it here, and in normal speech I don’t hear it.
Maybe, if I were immersed in the language, I would eventually figure it out. Or maybe not: consider the stereotypical Japanese speaker speaking English: “Rots of ruck, Charrie!”
They can’t distinguish the “l” from the “r” - they are ear-blind to the difference.
Which is why here in Santa Barbara we go up to San Francisco and down to Los Angeles.
I’m surprised no one has linked to xkcd yet. This one gives me a chuckle:
World According to Americans. (Click on the image for a bigger version.)
Or the number of English speakers who think “Tokyo” is a 3-syllable word.
“My woman from To-kee-yo…”
I’ve experienced this too - with Chinese coworkers. I believe it was the word for “yes” which, depending on the tone you use …
and then someone invariable draws the following on a paper towel, as if it explains anything at all to a French-Canadian white chick:
/ \ - U
… could mean poem or tree (I could be forgetting that). I spent the better part of a day trying to hear the difference and repeat it, and totally failed over and over. My coworkers thought it was hilarious. I think I - once or twice - managed to distinguish the ma used for horse and for mother? :o
It’s been a long time, and that’s the extent of the Chinese that I know.
I just occasionally forget about these “tone deaf” moments between English and French, because I speak them both, but then get reminded with other languages. :smack:
Yup, that’s surely part of it. Pretty much any map, not just wall ones, have north as “up” (though I concede the point that the “upness” is more “uppy” when it’s hanging on a wall than when it’s lying on a table).
I think even more, in the case of my mother, I mean, my friend, is from looking at globes. The three-dimensionality of a globe really does make it feel like water should trickle down from the north pole (and then drip off into space along the equator? leaving the entire southern hemisphere dry? whatever…).
Yeah, I’m beginning to get the picture that, of all the sound sequences “not native to English”, that one comes closest to having now been incorporated deeply into the language after all. “Bw”, too, as in French “bois”. One clue to how bw- has basically become “nativized” (along with vw-, probably) is that it you can find it in new coinages – such as that Doper favorite:
BWA-ha-ha-ha-ha! 
So it’s supposed to be Tok-yo?
To-kyo
Though I am curious about the Japanese family name “Uehara”. Given my limited-though-slightly-better-than-most-Americans’ understanding of Japanese pronunciation, I know that consecutive vowels are typically pronounced separately, but in practice are often run together, especially at the beginning of a word. So I would pronounce Uehara as, roughly, weh-HA-ra. But there’s a Japanese baseball player in MLB with that name, and the announcers consistently pronounce it OO-ee-HA-ra. I don’t know if this is the correct pronunciation given to them by the player himself, or if it’s their “best guess” (since I’m usually listening to the other team’s announcers. I remember when my Mariners first got Ichiro, and everybody I knew who hadn’t actually heard the name (they’d only seen it in print) was saying “ih-CHEER-o”.
I can find support for pronouncing Tokyo as Toe-key-oh and as Toke-ee-oh.
So I don’t think it’s fair to say people are wrong for pronouncing it with three sylables.
Isn’t it To-kyo by original construction?
Since you brought this up specifically in connection to rivers, don’t forget that the biggest and best known rivers in America (like the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Colorado) actually do run generally north to south, thereby reinforcing the idea that north is up and south is down. The Mighty Mississip’ runs straight down the middle of the country - from top to bottom. All the water starts from a big lake or something way up at the top of the country and then naturally flows out the bottom in New Orleans, as God intended. Rivers that flow from south to north are probably the work of the devil, if they really even exist at all - which they don’t, no matter what those lying elitist Democrats/Europeans/Communists/EnviroFascists would have you believe.
Like the fact that a 454-post thread may be 10 pages for you, but anywhere from 3 to 91 pages for someone else?
And the Egyptions. Fuck those guys.
And then you get nice L-shaped rivers like the Columbia. I’ve lived on this river my whole life … except the first 17 years were in Vancouver, WA, so that looking across the river meant I was looking south. Then my family moved to Wenatchee, WA, again right on the Columbia river, except now looking across it means I’m looking east. Took a good while after the move to get straight on which direction was north.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:495, topic:615416”]
Like the fact that a 454-post thread may be 10 pages for you, but anywhere from 3 to 91 pages for someone else?
[/QUOTE]
This is 13 for me. Which is perfect. Months spent fine tuning my settings have payed off handsomely.
You’re just in denile.
Finally, an explanation for the hellhole that is Jacksonville, Florida. 