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

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 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.”

I used to work with a Ukranian coworker, who had so little of an accent that I often forgot he was not a native English speaker.

One time during a meeting, I mentioned “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” and I can still picture the horrified look on his face when he processed what I just said.

In all fairness, it’s a pretty morbid expression!

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.

The Dutch word “poepen” (taking a shit), is a Belgian euphemism for sex. Which is always a great source of fun when making friends near the southern border.

As I’m half Arab/half European, my Arabian family tried to talk my native language. One of them wanted to say “I love you” which is in Dutch “Ik hou van je”.

He ended up saying; “ik geil van je” which translates along the likes of “I get horny of you”.

Had a good laugh but was bit odd to explain lol.

I went to the doctor because I was worried about me grinding my teeth (bruxism).

Instead of saying “hagishiri” or 歯ぎしり I said “hagEshiri” or ハゲ尻

so I told to the doctor I was worried about my bald ass.

I was once working with a team in India to resolve a database issue. During a particular call, we had to export data several times to create backups. Exporting the DB data is done with “dump” commands and my Indian counterpart would repeatedly tell me that he “took a dump just now”.

after hours gaming at work with awesome ukrainian colleague.

we all get regular beers from the fridge. ukrainian co-worker is sitting there and suddenly spits his drink all over the floor and looks utterly grossed out. He reads the label with scrutiny and says loudly ‘guys, vat thee fak is ROOT BEER?!’

oh how we laughed

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 went to Mexico and told a lot of people that they don’t speak Spanish. When someone said something that I couldn’t hear well, I’d compliment their digestion.

Right phrase: No hablo Español (I don’t speak Spanish)
What I said: No hablas Español (you don’t speak Spanish)

Right phrase: Que dices (What you say)
What I said Que diges (what digestion!)

Well to preface this, 6 months ago I moved to Japan to study Japanese.

During a trip to Tokyo I randomly ended up talking to a group of salarymen on the way to the same restaurant at me in akihabara. After a while they asked me if I live in Japan and I answered yes and then proceeded to say 日本にしんでいる instead of 日本に住んでいる, for those who don’t speak Japanese, I accidentally said I am dying in Japan instead of I am living in Japan which is surprisingly close pronounciation wise lol. This was met with loads of laughs