Mine too. Caught rhymes with caulk, cot with cock. Close enough, though. My wife (who has the same Midwestern accent as me) used to do home improvement work, and she told me a story about how she cracked up a co-worker by innocently saying that she liked the smell of caulk. It became a running gag with them.
Very correct that. And then there is “embarazoso”, which means embarrasing as mbh probably intended to say. Why should Spanish be easier or more logically consistent than other languages? Why make the gringos’ life easy when you can have a laugh at their expense? They do it too when the opportunity arises… (cite: all those caulk references up-thread)
Perfect opportunity to post Tool’s “Die Eier von Satan” (either the eggs or the balls of Satan). What sounds like a satanic chant turns out to be a recipe for hash cookies.
“Und keine Eier!”
I was watching the video when you edited your post to add the spoiler blur. How did you manage to do that? I thought, due to a Discourse glitch, that posts were ineditable after posting an embedded YouTube video.
See this sticky thread in “Site Feedback”. It’s all laid out there:
Thanks. The way I learned to post with a YT video was to add a forward slash ‘/’ to the end of the video URL. That works, but then I was left with an uneditable post. So appending ‘&1’, ‘&2’, etc. works and allows editing? Cool, thanks again for the info link.
Yes, it’s as easy as that. Sometimes when I edit a post with a YT link, I forget to change this, but conveniently the cursor jumps to the end of the link after closing the error message and I only have to hit backspace and increment the number.
Wow. These prairie oysters are delicious.
My father’s old boss was once explaining the Sunday brunch to hotel guests in french, which was his second language.
He said, “Tous les dimanches, on fait cuire le chef dans la salle à manger”
The actual meaning of those words is “every Sunday we cook the chef in the dining room”.
He was also well known for repeatedly calling hair dryers “séchoir à chevaux”. Chevaux means horses. Cheveux means hair.
Would you be embarrassed to go into a sporting goods store and ask if they have any balls?
The same is true in certain dialects of Spanish, where huevos means balls.
I think that English is the only major language where “eggs” isn’t slang for testicles.
jueves
Well it would be a very silly question. You’d need to be more specific. There are probably better examples where you’d want to word things differently.
Knock yourselves out. I really longed for scrambled eggs when I was in the German-speaking countries, too. Alas, it was not to be.
In Berlin at least you should ask for ‘stirred eggs’. May not apply in other parts of Germany.
Did you get kicked in the testicles instead?
Gracias.
No need for snark. Just trying to be helpful.
Customer in foreign land, not familiar with language: “I’d like balls this big.”
Clerk: “So would I.”
After years of studying Spanish, I finally decided recently to, you know, maybe try to have actual conversations with actual people using what I’ve learned. Boy, I am dreading gaffes like these. The other day, I completely retreated from trying to explain what kind of weapon that Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wields. I wasn’t sure if “un palo largo” was going to be taken the wrong way or not. Maybe “un palo largo de madera” instead?
