Embarrassing Gaffes in Another Language

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What embarrassing gaffes have you made when speaking another language? And what ludicrous mistakes have you heard other people make when speaking English?

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:25 (twenty-three years ago)

Endless, in English. Most recent one in French: I used the verb "jouir" to speak about not enjoying one's holidays due to awful weather to my workmates' great amusement. Allegedly, "jouir" is mainly used to describe to enjoy sexual pleasure...

― arantxa, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:39 (twenty-three years ago)

pas

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:44 (twenty-three years ago)

One of the new (Dutch) bosses at my old workplace referred to us all as his predecessor's offspring. On another occasion, he was talking about inter-departmental communication with a group of managers and said "Jill, suppose I was to say to you, 'I want to breed with you?'" I think he was looking for a word which meant something along the lines of "share ideas" and didn't realise he'd made a mistake until he noticed everyone giggling.

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:48 (twenty-three years ago)

My best one was the time I tried to say "social interaction" in German and ended up saying "non-profit sexual intercourse." The loveliest one I've heard was from my wife who announced, trying to say how very busy she was, that she was "running around like a chicken head."

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:49 (twenty-three years ago)

None, but I did annoy a Giraffe in German once which is close.

― Steve.n., Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:52 (twenty-three years ago)

I told the director of the company that I was getting a minor in gestation (=pregnancy) instead of gestion (=management). Oops.

― Miss Laura, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:58 (twenty-three years ago)

Also by a Dutch colleague at my old firm: on finally noticing that there were a lot of cardboard boxes under his desk which belonged to someone who'd retired months previously, he said "I'm sorry, I don't come under my desk very often."

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 06:59 (twenty-three years ago)

Do we all remember JFK's great one, whilst adressing the people of Berlin:

"Ich bin ein Berlinner!" which means, roughly translated, "I am a Jelly Donut."

― Andrew (enneff), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 07:07 (twenty-three years ago)

working as nursing assistant in dutch psychiatric hospital i meant to say:

"Shall I put these barriers up? " (on the side of bed to stop sleeping patients falling out) but actually said "Shall I get these lunatics up? "

― stevo (stevo), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:25 (twenty-three years ago)

http://www.cathouse-fcc.org/gifs-jpegs/southafrica/giraffe.jpg

― Steve.n., Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:32 (twenty-three years ago)

One of my school teachers was on a German exchange and was invited to dinner at the home of two old ladies who must have had a combined age of one hundred and ninety-seven. He had been coming down with flu and told them "Ich habe die Grippe". Down went the knives and forks and they stared at him in offended silence. He had confused Trippe (influenza) with Grippe (syphilis).

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:37 (twenty-three years ago)

As a student I once got chatting with a pretty Dutch exchange student over various English swearwords, her favourite being 'bugger!', an expression she used often, and thought completely meaningless.

After a long reflective pause, I felt obliged to explain, as delicately as possible, that this wasn't actually true, and why. It was our first meaningful one-to-one conversation. Her face glowed with embarassment. Last summer we got married.

― stevo (stevo), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:43 (twenty-three years ago)

So did you explain how it originally meant Bulgarian?

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:45 (twenty-three years ago)

What did it mean originally in Bulgarian?

― stevo (stevo), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:45 (twenty-three years ago)

blimey-O i am the master of this. i once reduced an Italian shop assistant to a giggling mess by asking for 3 fishes instead of 3 peaches. also in French class my friend nearly made the teacher's head explode when she explained that we'd been down the "maison publique" (= fr. for brothel) the other night. also i get amused by all the french tourists who, wandering around the shops at the mo, must wonder why all the windows have massive signs saying "DIRTY" in them ("sale" = fr. for dirty innit)

― katie (katie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:46 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh i get it, no I told her the truth, she still cringes about it.

― stevo (stevo), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 08:47 (twenty-three years ago)

My Spanish boss wanted to say that she didn't want us falling asleep in the office. Unfortunately, she said "I don't want you sleeping around."

― MarkH, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 09:17 (twenty-three years ago)

Hey, Mark -- you got the words backwards. It's OK to tell old ladies that you have die Grippe.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 12:12 (twenty-three years ago)

A friend told me once about attempting to order a McChicken sandwich in Spain and asking for a McPenis sandwich. Bedlam ensued.

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 12:20 (twenty-three years ago)

In my first Spanish oral exam my teacher was asking about my birthday & what presents I'd received, seeing as how my vocab was v. limited and I didn't want her to think I'd only got fruit & veg, I improvised & decided to tell her I'd got tapes only I decided the word was casetas (rather than casetes) which means huts or shacks or something. I was very bemused when she started laughing and asking where I'd put them.

I read something once about some bloke who'd been in Normandy with a French family and a long discussion about cider took place, he decided the word for cider in French was pronounced 'sida' rather than 'sidra', sadly for him SIDA is AIDS in French. D'oh.

― Emma, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 12:27 (twenty-three years ago)

I met a Scandinavian film guy in a bar a week or so ago, who told me that until recently, he thought that "a blow job" was slang for "an unsatisfactory performance of duty"; as in: "Look at that shoddy work! Why you did such a blow job?"

My own gaffes are all in Chinese. There are various scatological and sexual ones but for some reason the one that amuses me the most is when, asked how I travelled, I mispronounced the word for "airplane" and said that I had been taking a fat chicken around.

― Paul Eater (eater), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 13:07 (twenty-three years ago)

asking for a McPenis sandwich

Now them's TASTY! And then there's the special secret sauce.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 15:42 (twenty-three years ago)

not my gaffe, but a friend who went to ecuador for a year in a student exchange program told her classmates that she was "embarazado" 'cos she couldn't sing the words to the school anthem. they seemed quite shocked to hear this, but then she'd just announced that she was pregnant. there's also an incident in which she was exclaiming her love for penne (thinking of the variety of noodles) when in fact she was singing the praises of, you guessed it, the penis.

― mitch lastnamewithheld, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:19 (twenty-three years ago)

Now them's TASTY! And then there's the special secret sauce.

...

― Dave M. (rotten03), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:38 (twenty-three years ago)

You have to be careful and pronounce the extra 'n' in 'anno' when speaking Italian. Otherwise you could be asking someone how many anuses they have when you're asking their age.

― Kerry (dymaxia), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 17:12 (twenty-three years ago)

"What is the name of your airplane?" That one there, in the little cage by the window, here in southern France.

― felicity (felicity), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 18:51 (twenty-three years ago)

last weekend rainy and i had some american exchange students talk to us about "overcargill". i think they meant invercargill.

― di smith (lucylurex), Thursday, 29 August 2002 00:28 (twenty-three years ago)

God it's bad enough with one Invercargill without inventing another...

At a big gathering of Maori researchers, I delivered this speech which included a dodgy analogy comparing present government policy to "Let them eat cake." I speak Maori (the language of the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) reasonably well, but I didn't know the word for 'cake.' I looked it up in an online dictionary before fronting: "keke." The trouble is that online dictionaries don't have macrons (which indicate a long vowel in Maori). Evidently, my line "Let them eat armpits" caused some confusion...

― debaser (debaser), Thursday, 29 August 2002 02:46 (twenty-three years ago)

I walked into Harrod's and boldly asked where I could find a black Barbour vest, causing subtle but sincere snickering. It seems what I wanted was a "body warmer."

― felicity (felicity), Friday, 30 August 2002 15:57 (twenty-three years ago)

I (vaguely) remember being in Le Mans, tanked up on red wine but mostly being Very Tired due to having stayed up most of the night watching the 24 hour race. When calling for the bill (l'addition) in the restaurant, I was apparently slurring my words enough for it to sound just like "l'herisson" instead.

Confusion abounded as the waiters tried to work out if the dumb blonde really did mean to be ordering a hedgehog.

― C J (C J), Friday, 30 August 2002 20:38 (twenty-three years ago)

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