Ask Lemmy

I can't think of one off hand, but yours (E: and several of the replies) made me lol, thanks 😂

Not my story, but one a friend told me.

Someone had the misconception that there was a huge, huge sector of labor dedicated to working in cemeteries in the USA. Like almost everyone knew at least one person who worked at a cemetery. This misconception arose due to the ubiquity of the term "graveyard shift" regardless of the actual job being performed.

My Dutch friend. We were on discord playing guild wars and the topic of alcohol came up. The majority of the group are british and we were talking about different drinks like whisky, gin etc and the question came up "so what famous dutch spirits are there?".

There was a bit of silence before he said, "I don't know, William of Orange?". Turns out he had never heard of the word 'spirit' to refer to high proof alcohol before so selected a famous historical dutch figure.

My friend tried to call me a "night owl" because we tended to talk very late at night for my time zone. She accidentally called me a "lady of the night".

EDIT: "lady of the night" is a term for prostitute

I had sort of the reverse, working with German-speaking coworkers. I used the term "schpiel" to refer to a long talk I was going to give. This led to a moment of confusion because that's not what the word means in German. It means "game" or "play" and in the context they thought I meant to imply that I was not taking the speech seriously, or maybe wasn't going to be completely honest. Almost like a con. That's probably how the loanword first entered the English language, and its meaning has drifted over time.

Years ago, when I first moved to America from the UK, I was working in a pretty quiet office that backed on to a field. One day mouse appeared, freaked out a couple of the gals in the office, and then it ran and hid under an office cube.

I investigated to see where it was hiding, but it was pretty dark down there. So I asked if either of the gals had a torch. They both got an expression of wide-eyed horror, which confused me for a few seconds.

Then I realized that torch had a different term in America. So I corrected myself and asked if either of them had a flashlight. And they looked very relieved. They thought I was going to get an old school torch and try to smoke the mouse out or set it on fire, and probably set the whole cube on fire in the process.

I made this comment about a year ago: https://midwest.social/comment/6247683

"A friend of mine is a non-native English speaker. He teaches at an elementary school and works with ‘English as a second language’ students. He casually mentioned that he always tells his students to take a ‘horse bath’ in the bathroom sink after recess if needed. He was traumatized when I told him that he’d misheard that phrase for his entire adult life."