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?

  • @[email protected]
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    656 days 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.”

    • @jplate8
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      286 days ago

      What’s the real phrase?

      • @ieatpwns
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        616 days ago

        Whores bath. It’s when you hit up the bathroom to freshen your junk before you get busy

      • @[email protected]
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        56 days ago

        People are trying to post the answer and it’s getting censored lol. The term is “core’s bath,” but replace the “c” with “wh”.

        • snooggums
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          286 days ago

          It isn’t censored on most instances.

            • @[email protected]
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              5 days ago

              I’m quite impressed by the elaborate regex for the n word

              ni((g{2,}|q)+|[gq]{2,})[e3r]+(s|z)?

          • @A_Union_of_Kobolds
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            56 days ago

            I mean, I can kinda understand it - socialists/communists/anarchists generally prefer ‘sex worker’, because ‘whore’ has some pretty terrible connotations due to being used as a slur for so long.

            But still, censoring it instead of just deleting/blocking the handful of pricks who still say it as an insult seems… well, par for the course for .ml tbh

            • @glimse
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              66 days ago

              I don’t understand it at all when it’s not nearly as bad as some of the shit that gets said on there.

              Pretty pathetic that they feel the need to censor words

    • @daddy32
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      26 days ago

      So he wanted to tell them to clean up their junk, but mixed up the phrase?

      • @[email protected]
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        86 days ago

        He thought a “horse bath” was just a quick rinse off in the sink. He was inadvertently teaching ESL elementary school kids the phrase “whore’s bath” which, while it is technically just a quick rinse in the sink, there is definitely different connotation.