Goolie Get-together, as performed by The Toadies is playing in the iPod. It’s the theme song of the 1970-1971 cartoon Groovie Goolies. ‘Goolies’, in England and I suppose other countries, means ‘testicles’. If they’ve heard of the cartoon, they probably think the title is funny.
Similarly, ‘fanny’ has a different meaning over there. You can imagine the image they may get when I think of Fanny Flagg.
We had an Italian foreign exchange student in my high school German class. He used to crack up at the German name Knut (pronounced ‘k-noot’). He was too embarrassed to tell us why it was so funny, other than it was ‘dirty’.
A British quiz show host had a lot of fun with the name of the German skier Fanny Chmelar:
And then there was the Rolls Royce model that was supposed to be named “Silver Mist”, until somebody pointed out that “Mist” in German means “manure” and is used in colloquial speech as a bit less strong variant of crap or shit.
I once saw a bus in Germany with “Fücker” painted on the side of it. With the umlaut I assume it’s pronounced more like “fooker”, but it is still funny to this English speaker.
It’s also borderline. Chinese shopkeepers created their own “translations” into Chinese symbols before Coca-Cola created an official one. “Bite the wax tadpole” was one of several such. So although you can choose Chinese words such that the syllables Coca-cola mean “Bite the wax tadpole”, it is not unambigously the one thing Coca-cola means, and it was never the official “translation”.
Oh, and we can’t forget the famous town of Fucking, Austria, which recently changed it’s name to Fugging because they got tired of English speakers making jokes about them.
In Australia, when you connect your computer system to the outside world via a router, it is always pronounced with an “ow” sound to rhyme with “doubter”. British people, on the other hand, generally pronounce it the same as “root”. Even my dad now does this, after about a quarter century over the other side of the pond.
It will reliably crack any Australian up to hear people talking about “rooting”, “rooters” and “roots”, since here “root” is extremely vulgar slang for sex. Likewise for hearing Americans talking about supporting their football team (over here, we “barrack”)
A former French prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, caused some snickering in the Arab world because the proper French pronunciation of his last name resembles a Lebanese slang term for the penis.
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