Global Lingo Thread

[netsurfr]

Once went to a Rugby match in England with a number of American coworkers where Wostershire (spelling?) was playing another team.
It was quite amusing to us at first to hear the fans chanting "Go Woos, go Woos!" We quickly determined that the Brits had no similar slang to the American term, woos. Once we explained the slang to our British colleagues, they found it amusing too.

[trewornan]

Wostershire (spelling?)

Worcestershire is definitely tricky to spell.

[hoglahoo]

My dad enjoys Worcestershire sauce on his steaks. When I was a kid, it pained me to ever see a word I couldn't read or pronounce easily, so I pronounced it phonetically to remember the spelling, then used that spelling to remind myself how it was actually pronounced. So in my mind it became War Chest Er Shire and then I would translate to the phonetic Werster Sure.

Wasn't that fun?

[Nord Jim]

Worcestershire is definitely tricky to spell.

There was a young lady from Gloucester
Whose parents thought that they'd loucester.
From the fridge came a cry
"Let me out or I'll die!"
Then the problem was how to defroucester.

j

[Nickelking]

A aunt of my friends always called her nephews buggers. Their english mother didn't like that.

[Silver]

Well bugger is no longer considered a swear word, can't be bad language if it's in a Disney film eh?? Yet it still has a few uses. When something goes wrong or I make a mistake "Oh bugger" usually pops out, sometimes when I forget things too, hehehe

Whereas to call someone a bugger usually means they have a mischevious nature.

Lets face it, it's a far cry from the actuall meaning of the word, look it up in the dictionary if you don't know.

This is what I like about language though, the corruption or uses for words that have no relation to their definition.

[Kees]

This is what I like about language though, the corruption or uses for words that have no relation to their definition.

That's what you see in any living language: shifting of the meaning of words. That makes reading Latin so difficult. Latin was used from a couple of centuries BC right to the present time (yes the RC church still uses it and IIRC the Vatican still publishes some things in Latin).
My Latin teacher used to say that Cicero would not be able to make much sense out of Medieval Latin.

The same applies to a lesser extent when you read English from more than a couple of centuries ago. I remember reading Shakespeare with a so called glossary.

[Nord Jim]

That's what you see in any living language: shifting of the meaning of words. That makes reading Latin so difficult. Latin was used from a couple of centuries BC right to the present time (yes the RC church still uses it and IIRC the Vatican still publishes some things in Latin).
My Latin teacher used to say that Cicero would not be able to make much sense out of Medieval Latin.

The same applies to a lesser extent when you read English from more than a couple of centuries ago. I remember reading Shakespeare with a so called glossary.

That's what I love about the French. They think 40 old geezers (L'Academie Francaise) are going to keep the language static. And they end up codifying words like "Beuldozere" or however it's spelled.


I'm sincere, though, when I say I love it. It's the very definition of quixotic.

j