Many moons ago, I briefly dated a German au pair here in the US. After she left back to Germany, we’d talk on the phone occasionally, and one day she invited me to visit her and said that she’d show me some “good old-fashioned German hostility.” I cracked up. “What? What? Did I use the wrong word?” I said, “Yes,we Poles know all about old-fashioned German hostility.” I swear I could almost hear her leafing through a dictionary when she says “no, no, hospitality! Hospitality! Why are these words so close?”
In Hungary, a friend of mine went to order a “gombás pizza” (mushroom pizza) in a local Pizza Hut, except “gombás picsa” (fungal cunt) is what came out, much to the amusement of all.
In Spain long ago, I saw in passing from a train window, a building which bore in large letters, the words “Lecherias Collantes”. My Spanish is minimal: on reading this, I mentally translated it – having in mind, Spain’s long-standing reputation for Catholicism of a severe kind – as “lecheries which stick to you”: a stern warning against the lusts of the flesh. I later discovered that, boringly, the sign was just identifying / advertising the premises as a dairy owned / run by Senor Collantes.
All of us schoolboys-at-heart have long been amused by the fact that the Romanian word for carp, the fish, is “crap”. On a visit to Romania early this year, there was the chance of a meal in a restaurant with a wide-ranging menu; which gave me the opportunity for the first time, to order “crap” for my dinner. (It was fried, and very tasty.)
Another one with my aforementioned friend - to be fair, this one’s extremely easy to manage, especially if one’s had very little sleep - he was talking about stopping a project he was working on, but the particular form of “stop” he used, I misread as “give up” because the kanji are extremely similar. Like, maybe a few extra lines in one and that’s it sort of similar.
He wondered precisely why I launched into a worried pep talk until we both realized what I’d done…
Ha! In Mexico, the mini-buses (combis) all have “paradas continuas” – “makes frequent stops” – written on the back. Teenage boys snicker that it can also mean “continuous erections.”
When I was learning Arabic, one of our classroom exercises was translating short newspaper articles from Arabic into English. One article in particular was giving me and all of the other students fits. We all got pretty quickly that it was something about ice and a performance of some sort, but there was this one phrase, ala’ al-deen, that was obviously the key phrase in the article, but it didn’t make any sense. Literally, it translated to “the lamp of religion.” Something about a religious service, involving lamps? With ice for some reason? Of course, “lamp” could easily be figurative, so something about religious enlightenment maybe? But what was up with the ice? And other than that one phrase, there was nothing in the article referring to anything even remotely religious.
Finally, I approached the instructor and told him we were all just plain stuck. He looked very amused and told me just to say it out loud. I said it - roughly, “a-la-a-deen”. If you haven’t gotten it by now, say it out loud yourself.
[spoiler]It was a short article about a local performance of Disney’s “Aladdin on Ice” skating show.
This was in the late 90s when that was a current thing. In my/our defense, “Disney” for whatever reason wasn’t actually mentioned in the article. Of course, even if it had been, it would have been in transliteration, and transliterations of foreign words always threw most of us for a loop anyway, as we tried to look up non-existent Arabic roots…[/spoiler]
A gyro place here has on its menu gyros served in pita bread wrapped “in the form of a cone,” en forma de cono. I always had to be very careful when ordering it to not slip and say coño (“cunt”) instead, which is an extremely common expletive here.
Police officers in the US are told to make a certain sign (put your 2 hands out front, hands open, thumbs touching kind of like a “field goal”). Well that means “show me your license”. However many officers mess it up by putting not only the thumbs but the forefingers touching which now means “show me your vagina”.
My parents have a lot of good ones from the year they lived in Israel. Like the time my father tried to tell the bus driver he was lost, and actually said that he was “losing myself” (committing suicide).
The best story, though, is from the time they went to a friend’s (very religious) wedding in Jerusalem. The waiters were bringing out plates of chicken and asking the guests which piece they wanted. My father loves chicken breast and knew that “meat” is basar, and “white” is lavan. So, logically enough, he asked for “basar lavan”. :eek:
Protip: Basar lavan is used exclusively to mean pork. Chicken breast is elyon. And now you know, and knowing is half of not causing your waiter to nearly drop his tray.
Well, it doesn’t mean “show me your vagina,” it just means “vagina,” but I can see police officers doing it in such a way-- moving their hands from the person toward their chest-- which would make it mean something like “show me your vagina,” depending on the situation. If you had a woman cop and a Deaf man, it would mean “Keep away from my vagina.”
Which brings to mind something else.
Sometimes hearing people try to make up their own signs-- it’s almost always parents with little Deaf kids who do this-- people who know Deaf adults have someone they can ask-- and it never works out well. I had a little kid come up to me and ask me for cunnilingus once. It turned out to be the sign his mother had invented for Popsicle. Another time I saw a whole group of little kids in a mainstream program using one of the signs for “jack-off” to mean “ketchup.” Their teacher had invented it. :smack: You’d really think a person with a degree in Deaf ed. would know at least one Deaf adult she could ask.
Then, not dirty this time, just hilarious, I knew a hearing guy who tried to make up his own name sign. It violated every possible rule in the world for making name signs. Whenever I would show it to Deaf people, they could not stop laughing. It was like naming yourself “AM-r-sPR%###!” Seriously.
This happened many years ago. In response to a Spanish speaking co-worker’s question I wanted to reply:
“Tal vez estoy loco pero no estoy tonto” (Maybe I’m crazy but I’m not stupid).
Unfortunately my Spanish is terrible and it came out as:
“Tal vez estoy tonto pero no estoy loco” (Maybe I’m stupid but I’m not crazy).
Only after the guy started laughing did I realize what I had really said.
Not exactly a flub, but I was working with some Chinese people and learning a bit of their dialect; one particularly cute one I patted on her hip and she said “唔該”; this is an all-purpose expression that is used for “thank you” and “please”, but its literal meaning is “(you) shouldn’t” – sometimes even context is not enough to understand what someone actually means.
In Spanish, ferretería and cafetería do indeed rhyme The English word doesn’t because you’ve shuffled the stress to an earlier syllable, as is usually the case with words borrowed into English from Spanish or French.
And can someone explain to me why we call it “borrowing”? It’s not as if anybody plans on returning words!
That’s why in Spain we call that shape cucurucho when it refers to food Because while eating coños is fine if everybody involved enjoys it, it’s not something one should be doing in public.
Although I’d attended school in French when I was little and took some lessons as an adult, I’ve actually learned most of my French working with monolingual, French-speaking people. Often my team has included people whose French was so bad they made me sound like Voltaire (the philosopher, not the singer).
In my first project in France, we spent several minutes figuring out that the French entretenir (to clean; to perform maintenance) is indeed very different from the Spanish entretener (to keep entertained or amused).
A number of years ago I moved to Amsterdam and began taking Dutch language lessons. As I am already a fluent German and English speaker I was perhaps a little overconfident, as everything Dutch sounded like a cross of those two languages.
My focus was on the spoken language and my employer found a very proper, competent older lady to give me lessons each week. During the second or third week I had a leak in my apartment ceiling which required discussions with the landlord, and consequently I was somewhat late for my lesson. My teacher kicked off our conversation by asking me why I’d been delayed. I scraped enough Dutch together to tell her I was late because I’d had to pay the rent, as this was the closest I could get to describing the rather lively discussions I’d been having with the landlord all afternoon.
I did not know it but the Dutch word for rent is “huur”,which to my ears was almost completely indistinguishable from “hoer”, the Dutch for whore…
Not exactly a propos, but I was in Amsterdam and mailing a package of books to someone. I took it to the post office where the clerk (apparently like everyone else in Amsterdam) spoke English. She asked me what was in it. I answered, “Books”. “But what is in the books?” That’s what I though she had said and I repeated my answer and she repeated hers and I realized that she had heard “Box” and was asking what is in it. Well, I don’t know the Dutch word for books, so I gave her the German Buecher. She finally understood.
Dutch for “books” is boeken, so very close to the English word (pronounced more or less book-er, almost the same).
More risky :
s’entretenir avec quelqu’un = to talk with someone
BUT se faire entretenir par quelqu’un = to be supported by someone, with sexual favours in return usually very strongly implied.
Japanese is fun. Gotta make sure you hold that “i” long enough, or instead of telling that new mother her baby is cute, you’ve just said, “Oh, your baby is so scary!”
I only heard this one recently, but I love it: there was a man on a work crew who was from Mexico and didn’t know a lot of words in English. They were working near some geese, and you know how geese are, they hiss, they chase you, they’re generally mean. Apparently he had a run-in with one of the geese, and not knowing the English word for “goose”, he told his crewmates, “I do not like the cobra chicken.”
I will be calling geese “cobra chickens” from this day forth.
English does not borrow from other languages. English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them down, and rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary.
The English word doesn’t because you’ve shuffled the stress to an earlier syllable, as is usually the case with words borrowed into English from Spanish or French.
It’s not as if anybody plans on returning words!