In Fench “maintenant” has nothing to do with a prime leasee. It means “now.”
This is sort of an example of what this thread is looking for, in a roundabout way.
That webby thing you recline upon out on your patio? It’s a chaise lounge, right?
No, actually, it’s a chaise longue…which is French for long chair. The “longue” got corrupted into “lounge” when the term made its way across the Atlantic.
More Spanish lessons:
Quince - a fruity figure
Rape - not a crime, but awfully fishy all the same
Dime - penny for your thoughts?
Quince = fifteen
Rape = Monkfish (perhaps the ugliest fish at the fishmongers)
Dime = “Tell me”
To make up for your faux pas, your punishment is to visit the kuntsmuseum.
I’ll only go if the Kuntsmuseum store is having a slutspurt.
Hence “à la carte” -> “according to the menu”.
That’s Kunst, not Kunts. Or, indeed, Kuntz, a player who led to my favourite ever piece of football commentary. (You have to read this in a deadpan, BBC-commentator manner for the full effect.)
“And now here come the Germans, pressing forward once again… Kuntz.”
Another German one:
Rathaus - depending on your perspective, it may be a house of rats, but not in the literal sense
“Council house” or city/town hall.
Hungarian:
Legjobb - Not kinky, but still most excellent
“The best”
Bimbó - A pretty young thing?
“(flower) bud”
This one, without the accent, is also a popular brand of Mexican bakery products.
Post reported!
And dove is a bear. And low is no, and your friend Ken is named “yes”.
silently dying of laughter at work
I used to have really bright and cheery wrapping paper that alternated gaily wrapped packages and the word gift …
I have been looking for more of it for the past 5 or 6 years … it was printed back in the 70s …
Now I have german friends I can wrap presents to with it =) so of course I cant find it.
I love this one! Perhaps I’ll open a German-themed gift shop just for the giggle.
Oh, well that’s totally cool then.
“Smoking” means tuxedo in Italian for some reason.
And in French, I believe. In fact, French has a whole bunch of these pseudo-English gerunds masquerading as nouns that are almost, but not quite, the same as English.
le parking = car park
le camping = campsite
le footing = jogging
le pressing = dry cleaners
The concept the OP is describing is something called a “false cognate”.
In Spanish, the verb embarazar does NOT mean “to embarrass”. Likewise, its adjective form, embarazado/-a does NOT mean “to be embarrassed”. Much to the amusement of native Spanish speakers, many English speakers get tripped up by this false cognate.
So what does embarazar/embarazado mean?
To get pregnant/to be pregnant.
I’ve heard American students say things (in Spanish) that amount to something like, “When she posted those drunken bachelorette party photos of me on FaceBook, I got SO pregnant!”
D’oh! The Hummingbird* beat me to it!
*Colibrí means hummingbird, in Spanish. Also in German. Kolibri (“Operation Hummingbird”) was the tactical name given to the purging of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, in 1930’s Nazi Germany (the operation that we now call the Night of the Long Knives).
More often than not, “false friends” / “false cognates” do share some ancient etymological root of some kind. Not always, but often enough. I rarely make the distinction, when explaining the general phenomenon.
Hungarian, too. And probably a bunch of other languages. I assume it comes from “smoking jacket.”
That’s what I assumed, too, but it struck me as funny when I first came across it in my Italian book. There are a bunch of words that sound like English words in Italian that I can think of right now, but will come to me later.
What dialect is that? I’m absolutely fluent in Spanish (have a Master’s in Spanish linguistics), and I’ve never seen those words. Not saying they don’t exist…just that I’ve never seen or heard them. Not a single one appears in the RAE dictionary.