I’m just back from a week at the German office, where I am quite close with all the people there. I speak just a tiny bit (and that’s not false modesty) of German. Enough to get by, but I really struggle with hearing it. The speaker really needs to slow down for me to follow.
As a result, they like to “help” me with my German when I’m there. So about 5 of us were chatting and they were commenting on my accent and asked me to say some random things. I said this and that, and one of the things I said was “Haben sie Eier?” (Do you have any eggs)
Some of you may know where this is going. First a look of astonishment and then laughter. It turns out, Eier is their crass word for testicles. I had no idea, and I know why I came up with that phrase. Long ago (like, 30 years) someone in some English (language, not country) TV show or movie said it as a throwaway line. Random German. At that time I had taken German in University, but my German then was no better than now. I knew what it meant literally but not figuratively.
So I have just spent the last several day being teased mercilessly about my Eier (it was all good fun).
Idioms and slang are pitfalls when trying to learn another language. We have a number of Spanish speaking people in the maintenance department, and their English is definitely in the developmental stage. I speak literally to them and avoid idioms and slang that would be confusing to them. It helps.
So…what do you say if you’re at a German market and you actually want to know if they have any eggs?
Reminds me of a story a French professor told in college. They were at a French market and wanted to know if the milk had any preservatives in it, but didn’t know the word for ‘preservative’. So they tried putting a French accent on the word, hoping it was similar in French, and asked:
“Y a-t-il des préservatifs dans le lait ?” (intended question: Are there preservatives in the milk?)
The shopkeeper burst out laughing. Turns out ‘préservatif’ is French for ‘condom’.
I like to remind my wife about the time she told her French class that over the weekend I had sex with another man in my Jeep. Tapis is “carpet”; tapette is slang for “gay hooker”. Her teacher had to excuse the class while she gathered her composure. Thanks, sweetie!
Then there was the guy on our Guatemala team who assured us that he spoke Spanish. At our first breakfast in the hotel he ordered dos hueves frios (two cold Thursdays) instead of dos huevos fritos. The server’s expression had me laughing so hard I could hardly breathe.
I tend to pride myself on being reasonably good with accents (I can say ‘gynecologist’ in Dutch and get signoff from actual Dutch people. To date, that’s its only inherent value).
But my first love – a Swiss-German-speaking Swiss woman – could never sign off on my pronunciation of scrambled eggs in German – Rührei.
Knock yourselves out. I really longed for scrambled eggs when I was in the German-speaking countries, too. Alas, it was not to be.
Nitpick: it’s “Embarazado” with only one R.
Also there is a third point you could add, “Embarazado” with an O ending it’s masculine, so, unless we are talking about a trans man, it’s physically impossible. (A pregnant woman is “Embarazada”).
Years ago, I was in the coffee room at work talking to a friend about a project. The phrase “I like brown caulk” was the answer to a question about what he would use for something.
Those words were uttered just as Melissa walked into the room.
In my accent, “caulk” and “cock” are pronounced with a different vowel, so the joke doesn’t work as well. I assume this is because we’re not part of the caught-cot merger.
