Cece, who had just moved to Australia from Texas, told her friends she was rooting for the San Antonio Spurs. The room burst out laughing as her partner looked confused. She couldn't work out why everyone found it so funny until it was explained that in Australia, 'rooting' means to have sex. Her statement had inadvertently taken her passion for the team to the next level.
Clothing Confusions
Charlie Finnigan had been in London a few weeks from San Francisco when she spotted a stranger across the street and walked over to compliment them. 'I told them I liked their khaki pants,' she said. Her partner pulled her aside afterward. In England, 'pants' mean underwear, and 'khaki' sounds close enough to 'cacky,' British slang for feces. With one compliment, she had made two mistakes.
Few terms have caused more grief in the U.K. than the fanny pack. Travel writer Nick Kembel was packing for a day of London sightseeing when he told a group of fellow hostel guests he was going to grab his. 'All of them stopped dead in their tracks and started laughing,' he recalled. 'I said it again, thinking they hadn't heard me. The laughter got louder. Finally, one of the men explained that in England, "fanny" has nothing to do with your backside. It means female genitalia.' Nick now calls it a 'bum bag' in the U.K. and a fanny pack at home.
Sports and Slang
Cece isn't the only one whose team loyalty has led to confusion. The 2010 World Cup was on TV in every pub in Dublin when Arizona State student Joe Forte ended up at a table with a group of loud, friendly Irish guys. He asked who they were rooting for. 'The whole group burst out laughing,' Joe said. 'One guy pointed at me and said, "We have a rooter over here!"' In Ireland, the word means exactly what it does in Australia. They called him 'Rooter' for the rest of the summer. 'Every time I walked into that bar,' Forte said, 'that's all I heard.'
Phrases with Double Meanings
Travel writer Maja Proescholdt had moved from the United States to be with her British partner. One night, he came home from work and announced he could just murder an Indian. 'I was shocked,' Proescholdt said. 'I blew up at him. I said, "Why would you ever say something so racist?" He just looked confused.' Eventually, he explained. In Britain, 'murder' is sometimes used to mean 'devour,' and 'an Indian' is shorthand for an Indian meal. He was saying he was hungry, but Proescholdt's American brain had heard something else entirely.
Digital marketing consultant Andrew Compton was at his company's U.K. headquarters for an SEO training when he tried to gently rib a British co-worker. He called him a nonce. 'I meant it the way you'd use it jokingly back home, roughly like idiot or dummy,' Andrew said. The reaction was immediate. Dead silence, a weird pause, a strange look. 'In the U.K., nonce specifically means a child sex offender. There's no softening of it, no gray area.' It changed the feel of the rest of the conversation.
Misunderstandings Go Both Ways
British wildlife researcher Laura Murdoch was several weeks into a job in rural Wyoming, working night shifts on a sage grouse project with her American boss. 'It was just the two of us in a pickup truck, logging data after fitting a bird with a radio collar,' Murdoch said. 'I made a mistake in my notes and asked him, "Do you have a rubber?" In the U.K., that just means an eraser. In the U.S., obviously, it doesn't.' What followed was a long silence. 'I remember thinking, "Why is this taking so long?" In hindsight, I suspect he was trying to work out if he had an old condom in his wallet. Meanwhile, I doubled down by miming rubbing something out. That's when it clicked. He started laughing. I wanted to disappear into the Wyoming sagebrush,' Murdoch recalled. She retired the phrase immediately.
Mushfiq Sarker learned a similar lesson. A few months into graduate school in Illinois, he asked a colleague's roommate to wake him the next morning. Sarker had grown up in Bangladesh, speaking British-influenced English, and the phrasing came naturally: 'Can you knock me up at 7?' In Bangladesh, that means nothing more than a knock on the door. 'The roommate's face went through about four different expressions in two seconds,' Sarker said. His colleague explained afterward that in U.S. English, the phrase means to get a woman pregnant. 'I wished the ground would've swallowed me up,' Sarker said. The next morning, nobody let it go. The story followed him for the rest of the semester.
In the interest of fairness, I should point out one of my own. On a humid San Antonio afternoon, staying at Cece's parents' place, I asked my mother-in-law if she'd seen my thongs. The look on her face was a combination of embarrassment, bewilderment and genuine concern about who her daughter had married. It took a few seconds for me to realize the mistake. In Australia, thongs are what you wear on your feet at the beach. Sadly, that hasn't been the last time I've made that slip-up.
