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?

  • dmention7@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    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!

  • rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio
    1·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    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

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • frosty99c@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.”