What are some of your embarassing/insulting mis-speaks?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In honor of this thread about the recent Condoleeza rice big coup snafu, have you ever made a slip of the tongue or other verbal faux pas that got you into trouble?

The ones I can remember offhand:

-Reading aloud in second grade about Africa, including the Niger River. I was a bit surprised to see the word I thought that spelled in my book because my mother had told me it was never to be said in public (specifically she told me this when I was about three years old and said it in a crowded cafeteria in observance of the family next to us- my brother and sister got a big “talkin’ to” for teaching it to me), but I figured “I guess that’s where the word came from” and pronounced it with the imaginary second g. Luckily this was an all white school and the teacher was a former slaveowner probably (she was ancient, long retired from public schools) so she just calmly said “The word is n-eye-jur, shug… nig*ers are black people, but it’s not nice to call them that” and went on with the reading.

-I mentioned Phileas Fart in a book report in middle school. Still not sure what caused the mixup, but the teacher was unamused as she didn’t believe it was an accident.

-A few years ago at a conference dedicated to technologyand marketing I made a comment about the gay market and how many advertisers were singling them out as most gay couples are DINCs (Dual Income, No Children). This is a term you’ll find often. An Asian lady who was present was livid and complained loudly at me- until that moment I had no idea that the homonym dink is a slur against the Vietnamese. I apologized but I don’t think the byatch believed that I wasn’t slurring the Vietnamese, even though most in the audience knew the term (which I defined the first time I used it) and to think that I was saying “most gay couples are Vietnamese”, “Vietnamese have a lot more money to spend on things like big screen TVs or bed & breakfasts” or “technology items that aren’t good to have around kids due to breakability or adult nature are more likely to appeal to Vietnamese than to couples with small children” is just a bit ludicrous. (Incidentally she was Malaysian, not Vietnamese.)

Have you had any embarassing unintentionally offensive comments?

2

A couple of years ago the lab I was working for interviewed people for a Post-Doc position. One of the canidates was a young Muslim from France; her English was not great but she was very bright. Afer her interview, I took her out for some souvenir shopping. Dinner time came, and I asked her where she would like to eat.
“I like food with no chemicals,” she said.
“What kind of chemicals?” I ask.
“Chemicals that make them last longer,” she responds.
“Oh! Preservatives! You don’t like food with preservatives.”
She shook her head and stopped talking to me. Wouldn’t look me in the face.
I was very puzzled and took her back to the hotel.

The next day, I mentioned what had happened to a friend who lived in France for several years. She laughed, “Preservatives are slang in France for condoms!”

I was very embarrassed. The lab hired another person. To this day I wonder if somewhere in Europe this poor girl is telling people,“I went to the U.S. once. There was this preverted woman who offered me food with condoms!”

3

Some of the most embarassing thinga you can say is to confuse the English/American
meanings of ‘Fanny’ and ‘Fag’
On first visit to US asked receptionist in Hotel where I could get a fag (cigarette)
Its true that we are seperated by a common language.

4

What does fanny mean in English English?

5

I made a fool of myself during a presentation in front of my third-grade French class. I mispronounced a word, saying “cul” (ass) instead of “cou” (neck).

Basically, I said that a woman had a pretty necklace around her ass. :smack:

And the worst part is, I speak French. My family is French-Canadian.

They all forgot about it after a day or two, but I still cringe to think about it.

6

Vagina

7

Horribly embarrassing one. Luckily, only my mom and sister were subjected to it. In my late teens, early twenties I had a fondness for romance novels (God knows why). There was always a lot of talk of “he left a trail of fiery kisses down her neck” and other phrases with the word fiery in them.

Well, I’d never heard the word out loud for some reason, only read it in context, so I didn’t know its correct pronunciation. So, I made a bad guess that based on its similarity to the word fierce, that it was likey pronounced “feery”.

VERY embarrassing. Since that time, I have NEVER EVER said any word, that I was unfamiliar with, out loud. That is, until I was sure of its pronunciation.

8

When I was in HS, I was on my school’s School Reach team.

We had a category about medical fields.

The question was ‘The field concerned with aging and the diseases related to aging’ (or something like that). I rang in, intending to say ‘geriatrics’ They were looking for gerontology, so I don’t know if they’d have given it to me, anyway, but as soon as I hit the buzzer I blanked.

I sat there for a few seconds, frantically trying to remember the answer. I remembered it started with a g…

Just before time ran out, I blurted out ‘gynocology’.

And immediately sank under the table as I realised what I just said.

9

During a wedding ceremony, I accidentally referred to the bride’s parents by a rather rude form of address. Given the context, though, I don’t think anyone noticed.

It was at a ceremony hall I’d never been to, and they wanted me to give a speech that was loaded down with extra-polite expressions that nobody uses in normal Japanese. Almost every other word had an ‘o-’ added before it to indicate an honorific, and at one point I got carried away.

“Nishida-ke no o-tousama, o-kaasama, o-mae e douzo.”

Instead of politely asking the parents to come forward (mae), I called them by a rude form of the word for ‘you’ (o-mae). Since it’s so incongruous with the obvious meaning of the sentence, I wasn’t speaking too loudly, and my gestures made it pretty clear what I was asking, I don’t think anyone even heard it.

10

In middle school, I told my orchestra teacher that I couldn’t make rehearsal because I had to go see an obstetrician.

About a day later, I realized the word I really meant to use was “optamologist”.

11

I learned that lesson by mispronouncing “epitome” as EE- pit- ohm. In public. Loudly.

To make matters worse, I was expounding, with the vast experience and wisdom of a not-quite-13 year old, on the exploitation of the Niger, which I also mispronounced.

Got a lot of pompous knocked out of me that year :smiley:

12

True story.

At the first radio station I worked at we had a sponsor named Friar Tuck’s Fish and Chips. And all their commercials were done live.

Management gave them a LOT of “make-good” spots.

13

I had a bilingual embarassing moment also. I was taking my third quarter of undergrad German at Auburn University/Montgomery and I was working in a hotel. I was a very good student in the class- I’m told I have a knack for accents and languages, which is wasted really since I only speak English, but anyway…

We had a reservation for a businesswoman visiting a local manufacturing company and her name wasn’t Anneliese von Marienberger but it was at least that German. She was reserved for a room with one (1) king sized bed. When she arrived she was an attractive lady of perhaps 40 (I was in my mid 20s) and was accompanied by her Goth (in the black lipsticks rather than visi/ostro variety) son (I presume- he was an adolescent) and I didn’t think a king sized bed would be appropriate, so I asked “Would you prefer a double room rather than a single?” As fate would have it she was one of the 12 Germans ever who spoke very poor English and she couldn’t understand what I was asking.

As anybody who has ever taken an undergrad language course knows, much of the vocabulary and phraseology you learn is tourist related, so I happened to recall a sentence that I never thought would be appropriate. Near as I can remember I asked her “Mochten sie einzelzimmer oder doppelzimmer?” (Would you prefer a single room or a double room?") She smiled and said “Ah… doppelzimmer, bitte!” I then proceeded to ask her if she preferred smoking or non, I told her, in apparently perfectly understood if not exactly proper German where breakfast {fruhstuck, only with more umlauts) was served, and she asked me “Are you German? Or have you lived in Germany? Air Force maybe?” and I UNDERSTOOD HER! AND I RESPONDED AND SHE UNDERSTOOD AND SMILED! AUSGEZEICHNET!

Well, my coworkers were suitably impressed let me tell you, and I settled into an air of Barney Fife-ish smugness, self impressed at my own multilingual cosmopolitan self. She continued to speak to me in German, asking something about the airport and the theater (the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was located very close to the hotel) and I responded, slightly less smirky, then she either thanked me for my kindness or offered to sell me a service policy on my ocelot or asked if we have orange ice cubes in the tax broom or something- I was lost, but she was smiling and it didn’t seem to require a response so I smiled back and all was well.

This was in Alabama in late summer (100 degree heat and 100% humidity) and her son, who had gone outside while she was checking in, came back, sweating and grouchy. He spoke snappily to her and she just smirked and looked at me and shook her head with a smile. I looked at him and said “He is a hot young man” (in German). She looked at me with a change of demeanor, rather as if I’d just asked permission to give her Rottweiler a handjob, and I smiled and she didn’t return it. I said again “Your son is hot… that is why he is… in a mood that is not good” (or some other form of circumlocution) then she very formally nodded and said “Wiederschau’en” and left.

I really didn’t know what I said, because I was pretty sure I had said “He’s hot” correctly and I didn’t think she would think I meant hot in the “Orlando Bloom is one hot guy” type of way. I later told my professor (a very nice virginal scholar in 24" waist pants) about it and he chuckled and reddened just a tad and explained “You told her that her son is in a bad mood because he’s horny”. Heiß has two meanings, “hot” being the official but rarely used one- it’s almost always used for “horny”, and this was an adolescent boy in tight pants and Goth makeup.

My coworkers later asked me “Why’d she get so snippy? Did you ask your professor?” and I told them the truth:

“He had no idea. He said sometimes Germans are just like that with Americans due to the war and stuff.”

14

I learned the lesson pronouncing “misled” aloud for the first time. To this day, I still see “my-zuld” before I see “miss-led” but at least I know that I’m wrong now.

15

A beautiful and super-fun Québécois girl moved into my house a couple of months ago.

Giving her the run-down on the locale, I told her that nearby Commercial Drive was the place to go for putain.

The horrible thing is, I know what “putain” means, and I know how to pronounce “poutine”. My tongue just conspired against me. The instant it was out of my mouth, I just about choked.

The look on her face was priceless, though. :eek:

16

A little old lady who worked in our store directed a British tourist to the shoe dept once when he asked her where the rubbers were.

17

Having taught the American “fannypack” to a proper-Christian Australian (for her own good, so she wouldn’t just fall over hearing it on her own), it’s not just "vagina’, but the ultra-crude “construction worker” version.

18

I larfed during Nanny McPhee, when one of the domestics objects, “Such-and-such, my aunt Fanny!”

I’m sure everyone involved knew just how rude it was, but I was surprised, as I was expecting a totally sanitized children’s movie. (There are some comically ribald scenes later on that are practically Pantagruelian, though, and some good old fashioned father/daughter incest jokes, so with hindsight the “My aunt Fanny!” wasn’t terribly out-of-place.)

19

A Swedish exchange student at my high school caused a bit of a stir when he casually announced, in front of our ultra religious math teacher, “Could somebody please tell the cleaning lady that there are blobs of shit in the toilet?” He had no idea evidently that 1- we don’t use the S word in casual conversation and 2- Alabamians may shit, but we never discuss it above a whisper. (Even at the time I loved that these Scandinavian exchange students got their opinions of life in America from a religious school in Elmore, Alabama.)

Off track, but the biggest stir caused wasn’t word usage so much as cultural difference. When another teacher asked Kristjian, another Swedish exchange student, how kids in Sweden spent their weekends he very casually said “If we’re dating we’ll go to a movie and have dinner and then go back to her place or my place and make love.” The teacher told us “I think when he says ‘make love’ he’s referring to kissing and holding hands”, which Kristjian corrected with “No… sex.” Several jaws, including mine, dropped, but the other Scandinavians said “Yeah… that sounds right.”

WELL WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS?

“In their room. You don’t have sex with your girlfriend in the same room as your parents?”

Well… haven’t you ever heard of unplanned pregnancy?

“Abortions cost about six or seven dollars down at the hospital, no big deal. My girlfriend had one last year.”

One of the exchange students, female, said “I"m from a very religious family so we don’t do that, but most of my friends… yeah. It’s no big thing. Just call your parents to tell them you won’t be home.”

I think class ended early that day and the students were never asked again to discuss social norms of their homeland.

20

Eight years old: pronounced “haphazard” as “hapazard”.

Have since learned to actually read long words and not just skip to the end…