Was in Spain on a Spanish club field trip. I forget what I did as it was years ago but I wanted to express how embarrassed I was about something.

Used the word ‘embarrasada’.

Hilarity ensued.

Edit: Oh look! Other people in this thread did the same thing lol. I feel so much better.

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day 2 at a new job

Boss’s boss and I are the only two there.

Boss^2: Vhat is za status of our new office in Catalina

Me: O.o (They have offices all over the place but I am not aware it’s someplace named Catalina exists, I’ve heard of the dressing before so maybe it’s a thing?)

I…um I’m not sure

Boss^2: Well, you need to find out.

Me: I don’t even have anybody’s phone number yet this is just my second day if you have some people you’d like me to call I can do that.

Boss^2: yez, look up the office and call them and ask them what their status is.

Me: (starts googling Catalina, an island in California? That wouldn’t make any sense. A region in Spain Catalonia? That would make a little more sense but still not a lot and I don’t speak Spanish)

Boss^2: well?

Me: I can’t find an office in Catalina or Catalonia. You wouldn’t happen to have their phone number would you

Boss^2: Catalina, Catalina, CAT-O-LINA, sea ate aya oh lee n ya

Me: Wait, Carolina, I’m so sorry let me find them.

(Rings, voicemail) It’s 8:00 a.m., there’s no one there yet.

Boss^2: rrr o k

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.

Loose fit, but my family lived in Australia for a few years. We’re German. One night, my dad feels like a shake after a long drive to a vacation spot, so he drives up to a McDonald’s and orders, the rest of the family dozing in the car.

“One erdber shake, please.”

“Excuse me?”

“One erdber shake, please?”

“… I don’t understand.”

At this point my mum realized.

“Oh, a strawberry shake!”

We all have a bit of a laugh. He said the German word for strawberry, but pronounced it English. None of us in the car realized and we all understood. The lady in the drive through said she thought they invented a new flavor she didn’t know about.

He also swaps the th and s in Thous Australia. :)

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.

When my wife was in university, she went on an exchange with a dozen other students to a Chinese university. The program assigned her group a pair of local guides.

The first night, the guides offered to take them out for snake. Everyone refused.

The second night, the guides repeatedly offered everyone snake, saying that there were plenty of local places to get snake. Everyone refused.

The third night, her group had a discussion. They didn’t want to offend their gracious hosts. Snake had to be a popular local delicacy, because the guides repeated their offer daily.

They decided to be adventurous. One of them spoke up: “yes, we would like to try snake…”

The guide said, “what kind of snake do you want? chips? hot dog?”

Some years ago I was learning Chinese, I was excited and eager to practice after learning only a couple phrases, so one day I see this young lady handing out flyers downtown, I confidently approach her and say “ni hao!” and she replies “I’m Korean”. To make things worse the flyers were actually from a Korean learning institute.

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.

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.”

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.

He looked appalled and after I asked why he had that look, he asked what I was going to do with someone’s shit.

This is the shit.

I was in a sign language class (ASL) around Halloween and the instructor asked if we had ever encountered a ghost. We thought he signed tornado so we signed about times we were near tornadoes while he’s looking on with disbelief and shock and awe about all of our supernatural encounters. We had a good laugh when we figured out the confusion.

My argentenian friend called stuffed crust pizza “the pizza with cheese borders”.

Still call it that almost 20 years later.

Polish word for “searching” - “szukanie” - means “fucking” (the performance thereof) in Slovak language. This becomes a topic - and a source of amusement and confusion - almost every time people from these countries meet together, because how often these words are used.