Three Indonesian words I have mixed up over the years, to the puzzlement of my interlocutors:
kental - thick
kentang - potato
kenyang - full (as in, a person who has eaten enough)
I’ve proclaimed more than once that, “I’m a potato!” instead of “I’m full.” I also once told a restaurant server that the thin milkshake they gave me needed to be more potato.
I spent 3 years living and traveling all over Central America for the US military.
One of the things which surprised young and naïve me was the vehemence with which each country ranked themselves far and away the best of the bunch. And while each had some ranking of the others from way less good second place down to truly horrid 10th place or whatever, each had very much different rankings of the others than did their neighbors.
When visiting country A we took great care not to mention previous or planned interactions with Countries B through J. There’s no way that would end well.
Now here in Miami and with Cubans thick on the ground I will say that their accent is … syrupy. Imagine some American from way out rural Southern US who speaks very slowly and indistinctly without moving their face muscles or tongue much because it’s too hot and they’re too lazy to do it, and they almost don’t pronounce their consonants so it’s all just a blur of mushy vowels. Got it? Now speed that up about 20x: that’s Cuban Spanish. Or at least US expat Cuban Spanish.
I once greeted a Cuban cow-orker with ¿Qué onda?, a phrase I’d just learned from my hispanophone sister. He stopped and icily informed me that that translated to “What wave?” and was meaningless gibberish. What he really meant, of course, was that it was Mexican slang and therefore a debasement of his pure and proper native tongue. So I whispered “Besa mi culo, cabrón” under my breath and ignored him for the rest of the day.
You might be reading too much into it. I think he was offended by the informality more than the national origin of the phrase. It’s a bit like if you were to greet a coworker with “sup.”
Oops, wrong thread.
I actually always assumed they were cognates, that “penne” was named for the penis, because, well, they’re penis-shaped.
Boy, am I embarrassed to find how wrong I was. They’re named for actual pens, as in feather pens, because of the angle that they’re cut.
Oof. Forgive me for boofing up my response upthread. What I meant to say was: my one experience with Miami Cuban Spanish was at Versailles restaurant (for those who don’t know, it’s a famous Cuban restaurant in or adjacent to the Cuban part of Miami). As Mrs. Homie and I were waiting to be called for our table, we noticed that everyone was dressed better than us in our tourist garb. Anyhoo, when the hostess called us in I asked her, in English, if we were dressed ok. She said “que?” (what?). So I said, “Nuestra ropa … es buena?” (our clothes … are they OK?). She smiled and said si! At our table, our server spoke to us in perfect English. I felt it would offend him if I tried to carry out our conversation in my vasty inferior Spanish.
I just wanted to add that that guy does indeed sound insufferable.
Amazingly, it turns out the same mistake is possible in English (though I think that this one resulted from a phone-keyboard autocomplete/autocorrect (the intended word was “pectin”):
Yes, my phone turns pectin to protection every time i try to write it. 
Now that I’m aware of it, i can undo it.
The same confusion can arise in German, where “Präservativ” means condom. “Preservatives” in food are “Konservierungsmittel”.
Is it an Android? You wouldn’t think an Apple would get this one wrong.
It’s because i swype. If i painfully peck out each letter, as apple requires, i get the right word.
(Maybe Apple has upgraded its keyboard to enable swyping. At a critical time in my phone ownership, when i was debating between Android and Apple, it didn’t.)
I don’t think the phones make very good jelly, either way.
She wasn’t saying anything wrong though, the only way to ask if there are eggs in the store is that .
“Tienes huevos” and “Hay huevos” are both correct. (“Hay huevos” is less charged in fact)
The problem is that the word is so completely associated with testicles that there is, in fact, no innuendo-free way of asking if there are eggs in the store.
(The correct rioplatense “Tenés huevos” is even worse).
We natives usually try and check if there are eggs in display and if there are not we try to use circumlocutions like “Huevos, hay?” or something like that.
Also, be aware that telling a house mate that there is no more yerba mate in the house can be interpreted as asking for sex (not really, but in a funny way) due to the old joke:
Husband( to wife): Dear do you want to drink mate or have sex?
Wife: Well…, we are out of yerba mate…
“Pene” also means penis in Italian. That double n is very important.
Similarly, if you’re explaining how old you are, be sure to double the n in “anno”. “Ho venti ani” means “I have twenty buttholes”.
I think the English equivalent would be “Do you have any nuts?”. Or perhaps, in a sporting good store, “Do you have big balls?”. In either cases, the store clerk would certainly understand what was meant, but the possibility would still exist, if either party wanted it to, of deliberate misinterpretation for humorous effect.
I think English might be the only major language where “eggs” isn’t slang for “testicles”.
Exactly.
In parts of Mexico they say “blanquillos” (little white things) for eggs, just to avoid the vulgar/jocular connotation of “huevos.”
About 25 years ago, a minor Mexican pop-rock singer released an album called “Soy Sauce” — meaning “I am a willow tree.”