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?
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:
Female pubic region, having gone into a state of repair/part of male mating call
Only Growler I have is from a brewpub that doesn’t exist anymore. They did gangbusters business in a walkable downtown area selling pints over the bar. They decided to move across town to the part where pedestrians never go to focus on retail sales of packaged beer and were out of business within 6 months.
What does that mean to you?
From a 2003 entry in urban dictionary:
Female pubic region, having gone into a state of repair/part of male mating call
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
I think so but I’m not American, I’m British
It is used that way here, yes. I’m not familiar with any other meaning.
Maybe they thought you were accepting the classic introductory RPG quest?
Gotta get that xp somehow.
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.
At least you didn’t ask to bum a fag
Not a single Jonathan who has been through the UK school system in the past forty years has gotten away with being asked “Have you got a rubber, Johnny?”
Not one.