Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
I lived for the better part of a decade in Vietnam thinking “đại lý” was a loan word from English meaning “daily”.
It actually indicates an agent (like a reseller) – e.g. a lottery ticket seller, news stand, and so on. “Daily” just worked in all those contexts by coincidence.
I also mix up “in stock” (in a warehouse) and “available”. So an analogy is I often ask people if they have “a clock in their warehouse” instead of if they “have the time”.
Also probably two dozen equally weird things I’m not even aware of. People are pretty chill about it, mostly because the number of people without Vietnamese heritage that speak the language in any capacity, rounds down to zero.
In Germany, it’s really popular to call each other “Digga” as a way of saying “Dude” or “Man”. Its origins come from the word “Dicka” (read: hey fatty, hey thicko), but the Hamburg dialect changed the k to a g.
I, uh, thought it came from a different route via the US. I was wrong…
I made a… similar mistake due to Sonic Allstars.
Similarly, I saw “fija” in the Spanish description on so many bottles of hairspray that I thought it meant “spray” in English. No. It’s “hold” in that context.