An example of what I mean:
I, in China, told an English speaking Chinese friend I needed to stop off in the bathroom to “take a shit.”
He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.
I had not laughed so hard in a while, and it totally makes sense.
I explained it was an expression for pooping, and he comes back with, “wouldn’t that be giving a shit?”
I then got to explain that to give a shit means you care and I realized how fucked some of our expressions are.
What misunderstandings made you laugh?
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 don’t remember the details, but a similar situation on a ship with people from all over the world, resulted in my shift being called “vampire shift”. It was very suitable too, as I got up at sunset, and my shift was over around dawn. I liked it that way - it kept me out of the sun.
EDIT: This was in addition to the other shifts; day shift (noon->midnight), night shift (midnight->noon), and chief shift (0600->1800). My shift was a weird one that only I had so that I could overlap with both day and night and cover for the chief tech during his off hours.
We had two female black cats named Midnight and Luna,
When guests would come over ask about our young children about the cats, a child would explain to the adult guests that Midnight and Luna were our ladies of the night, explaining that Luna means moon.
This went on for years.
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.
One time when I was a kid, we went on a long car trip and a thunderstorm approached. My dad said, “Don’t worry about the sound. It’s the light that kills you!” My Japanese mom was not cool with this. “No, it’s the sound. What are you talking about?” A fierce argument ensued.
So, the words for thunder and lightning in Japanese are kaminari and inazuma, respectively. But that’s not a perfect translation. kaminari means something like “peal of the gods”, and is the forceful, dangerous part. inazuma is basically just a light show.
English is the opposite. Thunder is just a sound, while lightning can kill you. To put it another way, in English, one word is light + electricity while the other is sound. In Japanese, one word is sound + electricity while the other is light.
Anyway, I was about to speak up when my big brother tugged my arm. “No. This is a popcorn moment. Don’t ruin it!”
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 was in North Carolina for work recently and one lady was talking about her local brewery where she could “grab her growler” and head over there. Took me a while to recover from laughing at that one.
I means a bottle for transporting beer here, I’m guessing like all British slang it means genitalia?
Oh of course yeah, if it doubt then it is a safe bet to assume that. From a 2003 entry in urban dictionary:
- Growler
Female pubic region, having gone into a state of repair/part of male mating call
Get your growler out
Is growler not used in the US the same way? It’s a style of jug in Canada most often for beer, wine or cider
Thank god you didn’t ask them if you could borrow a rubber.
UK English: Eraser.
US English: Condom.
Haha, yeah. Pretty sure I would have been summoned to have a chat with HR in that case.
Maybe they thought you were accepting the classic introductory RPG quest?
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.”
People are trying to post the answer and it’s getting censored lol. The term is “core’s bath,” but replace the “c” with “wh”.
So he wanted to tell them to clean up their junk, but mixed up the phrase?
He thought a “horse bath” was just a quick rinse off in the sink. He was inadvertently teaching ESL elementary school kids the phrase “whore’s bath” which, while it is technically just a quick rinse in the sink, there is definitely different connotation.
just a quick rinse off in the sink
Bird bath, sparrow bath, crow bath. Terms in some Indian languages for that.
