Ask Lemmy

A friend of mine was doing work-study in France and thought she was offering to show her coworkers her cat. Thankfully her coworkers informed her that she was being more than just friendly and how to actually offer to show her feline.

George Carlin talked about this, "Take a shit? You don't take a shit, you leave a shit! That's the whole idea!"

Another friend once thought twat was a synonym of twit. First time she called someone a twat in my presence I was gobsmacked but thought I must have misheard; there was definitely nothing twattish going on.

The next time it happened I made a note to raise it privately with her later. "You do know what twat means don't you?" "Yeah, it's another word for twit." "Er, no."

I mentioned once giving a person of the female persuasion a wide berth (meaning to avoid that person. I can't remember why, maybe she was particularly annoying or something).

My friends face made me realise he didn't know that particular word and couldn't work out what a wide birth was.

I don't have an anecdote, but I do have a good joke.

Late at night, a German coast guard radio operator gets a distress call. A British ship has capsized and is quickly taking on water.

"We're sinking, we're sinking!!" The panicked sailor yells over the radio.

Confused, the German operator takes a minute then responds "What are you... sinking about?"

getting a handy in Germany is not what you think it is

Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.

During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs

This happens within English too.. I'm a climate scientist, and I was working in consulting talking to some financial risk people. They were asking us for a "conservative" risk figures. In climate science that would naturally mean a low warming projection. For them it meant being conservative in their appetite for risk, so actually more like a worst-case example. That one took a couple of heated meetings to figure out.

I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.

The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.

Took some time for them to realize "tabling" an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK

Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.

No foreign language, but still.

Chatting on Skype with a Chinese developer, he said "I need to take Friday off for family matters" and I said "no worries"

He apologized profusely, and eventually I realised that to him, "no worries" meant something like "No! I am very concerned!"

I've since taught them some more Australianisms.

Not exactly a misunderstanding but... my dad (a professor here in the U.S.) had a close friend and colleague, a Spaniard, who would go off to an intensive language summer school thing every year to teach American college students whatever esoteric Spanish literature was his specialty and only spoke Spanish the entire time.

Whenever he got back, he would spontaneously start talking to us in Spanish, suddenly realized we didn't speak Spanish, then restart again in English. It didn't embarrass him or anything, but it amused me when he did it.

Our Austrian exchange student told us "My sister wants to be a wet".

The v sound is hard for German speakers

Guy I worked with when younger, at a restaurant, primarily a Spanish speaker. He kept telling me that another one of our co-workers "won the race"... I had no idea what he was talking about. "He win the race, he win it!"

What race? Eventually he expands to say it was easier to say in Spanish, but basically if there was a race to be fat and ugly, this guy would win that hypothetical race.

He was very pleased with himself.

If there's one important thing to learn from this thread, it is that idioms do not translate. At all.