When I was working in athletics, I was once on the phone with an individual in Italy who was working with me to book an international tour for a national basketball team. She spoke no English, I spoke little Italian, but we both had pretty good college French, so we had a language barrier to start with, but what really caused us a problem was the word ‘coach’.
As an American, the word ‘coach’ to me meant an individual, the leader of the team. To my Italian friend, the word meant ‘bus’ as in motorcoach. When I asked her if someone would be meeting the coach at the airport, she couldn’t understand why the bus would be at the airport and why someone would have to be there to meet it. When she told me they had a place for the coach in a back lot behind the hotel, I couldn’t understand why the man couldn’t get a hotel room.
Eventually we had a Eureka moment and figured out what we each were talking about, but it took us quite a bit of confusion to get there.
Once when I was in maybe 2nd grade some high school students said I should call this other HS girl a whore. Well I did but I really had no idea what it meant - I actually thought it had something to do with horse.
Well it got back to my parents who got mad at me but they dropped it when when I told them some HS boys asked me to say that and I didnt know what it meant.
Great story! Poor coach has to be in the back lot by the hotel. This reminds me of one of my favorite doper threads. Someone asked if they should get a marquee at their wedding (a Brit). All of the Americans went, “Why the hell would you get a scrolling electronic sign at your wedding? What would it even say?”
Apparently a marquee (marquis?) is a tent across the pond. Oh.
ETA: I just looked it up and it’s even spelled the same. Etymology of that word might be faintly interesting. Notice I said might be. Etymologists of the Dope, I am not really interested. I just said that so you would like me.
When I was in my early 20’s my then-boyfriend and I were at his work’s Christmas party. He was outside having a smoke with his co-workers when suddenly I see the toughest co-worker shoving and yelling at him. I asked my boyfriend what happened and he was genuinely confused - they were all bantering and he called the guy a “diddler”. He honestly didn’t know what it meant, he thought it was just a goofing-around insult.
One time in high school we were in a class. A friend of mine asked me to ask the girl sitting next to me if she’d give Edward Furlong a blow job. So I asked her. She didn’t know what to say. Then the friend asked me if I knew what a blow job was and I said no. I’m not sure if that counts as getting into “trouble” though.
From the French marquer, to mark, to put up a sign, to write; the word marquée itself means label or sign in French. The tents aren’t just any tent but large ones, such as would nowadays be used to host an event; the name comes from being similar to the “marked” tent where the heads of an army would hold meetings (marked by their pennants, coats of arms or similar emblems). In the case of the American meaning, it’s just a special type of sign, one which allows you to “write on” continuously.
I shocked my mom one day by calling the cat “a queer”. I had learned the word queer from reading Alice in Wonderland and understood it to mean peculiar. Therefore if you called someone a queer you were just calling them a weirdo.
Another time I was made to come in from playing because my grandma heard me call my brother a jerkoff. She asked me furiously if I knew what that word meant, and answered herself, “Masturbation!” I asked her, “What’s that mean?”
Just remembered another anecdote. Last year when my husband and I were visiting Germany, we were in a hotel that had a really cool pool. You could push a button on the side of the pool and a waterfall would start. It was also connected to a sauna room. In the sauna room was a button marked “Notruf”. Well, we don’t speak German, but let’s see what this button does…It called the attendant, who was freaking out because somebody had pushed the button marked “Emergency”.
When my age was in the pre-teen years that’s how we used “queer”–just like “weirdo.”
Another example of why adults shouldn’t have knee-jerk reactions (no pun intended) when they hear a kid say something that would be alarming if an adult said it.
“Rubbers” was also on the list of items prospective nuns could bring to the convent at one place I visited. In that case, it would be equivalent to galoshes.
My parents told my sister and I that they had briefly considered naming her after my mother’s grandmother Bridget. So all through our childhood, I called her by the nickname “Britch”. It got me some weird looks when I used it in public…
When I was a kid, we’d ride our bikes all over the neighborhood and play at random kid’s house. One particular day, my Dad told me to be home by “quarter-after one”. I had never heard that before. At about one I asked all my friends if they had heard it and they said nope. We figured since a quarter is twenty-five cents, he must have meant 1:25, so that’s when I went home. My Dad lost his shit. He was ridiculous.
3M’s Durex was the dominant brand of adhesive tape in Australia for many years, to the point that “Durex” became a generic term for tape (like Scotchtape to a lesser extent in the US). Durex is also the top-selling condom brand in the UK. This apparently resulted in some confusion for my brother during a visit to Oz, although he would never give me the details.
When I was a young boy, I once told my aunt that I was going to rape her. I obviously didn’t know what it meant, but the horrified looks I got from everyone were enough to let me know I shouldn’t use that word. Once I was old enough to understand what it meant, I understood the reactions.
In the fourth grade, some wag in my class persuaded all the rest of the students to call some kid a “dildo”. So the kid walks into the room, and the whole class chanted, “Mike is a dildo!”. Teacher blew up at us, and suggested we ask our parents what the word meant. (I asked my dad, whose answer was simply, “It’s a dirty word.”).
