Might want to ask here
beforehand.
The Gaelic word for a wasp is fuch.In Gaeilge, the letters "ch" are pronounced like "ck", so it sounds like a certain F-word.
Bow down to the Motherfruit.
Removed this:
- Jerry Seinfeld dated a former Olympic athlete from Romania, where apparently "the Comedian" was a mythological great lover. At the end she told him, "You may tell jokes, Jerry Seinfeld, but you are no Comedian."
Because the joke isn't that "comedian" means something different in Romanian, it's that (in the fictional Seinfeld world) Romanian women assume comedians are good in bed the same way American men assume gymnasts must be good in bed (even if, as Jerry admits, they're not sure why).
And removed this:
- An inversion of the Hitchhiker's example is the fact that in Babylon 5 every culture has invented the dish we call Swedish Meatballs, only they call it something different.
Because the trope is about different languages using the same word (or words that are pronounced the same) to mean different things. The example is about different cultures having the same thing using but different words to refer to it, which is basically the opposite of the trope.
Edited by 67.149.204.33
The Real Life section is a mess. Couldn't we separate examples by language?
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Some clean-ups:
Deleted since it is not an example, and a cognate between two Germanic languages is not exactly remarkable:
- The German term for False Friends is "Falsche Freunde". Which happens not to be a false friend. Both the term and the two words that make it up mean exactly the same thing in both languages.
Not an example because "upright" is the basic meaning "erect" in English:
- And there is, of course, Homo erectus. (It actually means "man who can stand up straight," just like how Homo habilis before it means "skillful man" and the scientific name the species next in line after the former, us, name means "man who can think.")
Removed as not relevant:
- In non-US English the spelling is paedophile/paedo (the "ae" is pronounced the same way as "ee"), with the "pedo-" prefix retaining the meaning of "related to soil." Presumably gardeners should be wary of what they call themselves.
There are a bunch of random minor coincidences between short words, which are not very interesting and probably not worth mentioning. But they are examples, so I'm not deleting them myself.
Some bad words are inconsistently censored. No Lewdness No Prudishness says not to censor things relevant to the example.
Various examples are unnecessarily verbose.
I moved some non-examples to Separated by a Common Language.
Also, I couldn't figure out what this means:
- Made even better by a scandal involving a party calling voters intending to vote for another party telling them their voting station has been changed ... to the address of a Poutine store. Cue political cartoons about voter's oppression in Russia under the foot of Putin (not that there has been a lot, just a little more on the socialist side) comparing voter's oppression in Canada under a box of Poutine.
Could somebody fix it?
There's actually another example somewhere about 'chai yan' meaning one thing in Cantonese and another thing in another Chinese language.
Edited by Paradoxic