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In the world of sitcoms and dumb movies, a guy going to a foreign land is bound to say something completely idiotic in the strange language.<\/p>\n While shaking hands with a possible business partner, he says, “your rhinoceros is very snotty.”<\/p>\n Or “your mother is pregnant with my baby.”<\/p>\n Then, either everyone laughs while he says, “what did I say?” or he goes about his life without noticing the puzzled looks that follow him.<\/p>\n It’s very stupid. Where did he learn the phrase? What made him say it?<\/p>\n Have you ever, upon meeting a stranger, blurted out a string of vowel and consonant sounds, hoping that it’ll mean something?<\/p>\n Mistakes do happen, of course. You try to say a particular word, but get it slightly wrong and it means something different. Or your accent is bad, and the word you’re saying sounds like something else.<\/p>\n Or you don’t know the exact word, so use other words to get the idea across, and sound kind of silly. Happens all the time.<\/p>\n Here are things that happened to me. Of course, I’m leaving out all the many times that I couldn’t figure out what was being said, or I couldn’t make myself understood. What follows is a short list of the ones I ended up working out.<\/p>\n THEY TRIED IN ENGLISH:<\/p>\n 1. CheekBeard.<\/strong> A Dutch guy was cutting my hair and wanted to know whether I wanted sideburns. So he asked, “do you want your…cheekbeard?”<\/p>\n This is probably a direct translation of how the Dutch say sideburns. It cracked me up, and I laughed hard and at some length. The guy got kind of annoyed, and with reason, but I just couldn’t help it. The word tickled me.<\/p>\n 2. Potatoes.<\/strong> I was very sick, and stumbled into the doctor’s office. She did some stuff that I can’t remember, then looked at me and asked, “Have you had potatoes?”<\/p>\n Now, I’d been working on this farm for about 5 months, and as far as I could remember, we’d had potatoes every damn day. So I said, “yes, I’ve had potatoes.” Good God, do I have some kind of potato disease?<\/p>\n She put an IV in, and after a while my head cleared. Hepatitis. Have I had hepatitis?<\/p>\n That was the last time I could honestly answer that question with a no and I blew it by saying yes.<\/p>\n 3. Caving.<\/strong> The Italian family gathered around, and after talking amongst themselves for a while, the father tried to tell me what they were talking about.<\/p>\n “You,” he said, “you, caving costa ner.” Big smile.<\/p>\n Caving? On the Costa Ner? No. Where’s the Costa Ner?<\/p>\n This one took a long time to get through. Some of this isn’t just a language issue, because they were saying that I look like Kevin Costner, which I don’t.<\/p>\n I TRIED IN FRENCH:<\/p>\n I was speaking to a French-speaking guy about Caracas. I’d never been there, but I was telling him that another friend had called it an ugly and dangerous city.<\/p>\n “Une ville laide et dangereuse.”<\/p>\n The first three words should be pronounced sort of like, “OON VEEYA LED….”<\/p>\n I, making the classic American mistake when speaking French, dropped the ending consonants. Hence: “OON VEE LAY….”<\/p>\n My friend was very confused. I had said, “A life milk and dangerous.”<\/p>\n A far cry from the sitcom lazy attempts, but still pretty funny once we figured it out.<\/p>\n In an expensive restaurant, it slightly bugs me when a waiter doesn’t know how to pronounce a foreign-language item on the menu. Not a big issue, but they should train them better. We look to them for help on these things.<\/p>\n But it’s happened several times that I’ve ordered the Salade Niçoise (pronounced NEESWAZ), and the ignorant waiter has corrected me. “Oh, you want the salade NEESWAH?”<\/p>\n They make the (previously noted) classic mistake of thinking that all French words drop that last consonant, especially when it’s an S.<\/p>\n And finally, every single time I typed the word, “consonant” in this post (including the one in this sentence), I’ve misspelled it and gotten the red underline. Why can’t I remember how to spell that word?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sitcoms are Stupid In the world of sitcoms and dumb movies, a guy going to a foreign land is bound to say something completely idiotic in the strange language. While shaking hands with a possible business partner, he says, “your rhinoceros is very snotty.” Or “your mother is pregnant with my baby.” Then, either everyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}