Do people who speak/read english but don't have english as a first language, understand english euphemisms even if you explain them to them?

For example if I talked about "road pizza"... does an explanation even make sense? Maybe the flatness of the pizza I suppose but I guess that would depend on which neighborhood you come from if your pizzas are really all that flat.

If you say "!Vaca Santa!"(literally "Holy Cow!") to a Spanish speaking person they wouldn't have a clue what you mean. Can you explain that english euphemism to someone so that they don't think you are a mental case?

Barb

Singingcrk, LMAO at Now Hiring All Shifts without the F!!!!
That's as good as this one- NO KIDDING- at a Chinese Restaurant in Front Royal, Virginia- a sign on the glass door:

HOSTRESS WANTED

Shore

"Do people who speak/read english but don't have english as a first language, understand english euphemisms even if you explain them to them?"

Someimes, but for the most part, no. It is even more difficult when you don't live in a country where English is the primary language.
On the other hand, English in England is different from the one spoken in the U.S. or Canada or Australia. Even in the U.S., there is a variance from one region to the next.

I have lived in the U.S. for more than half my life. I read and write English extensively. In fact, my first language is deteriorating while my English is improving, I think. LOL. However, I still don't understand a lot of things. Take humor for instance. For the life of me, I don't see what's so funny about slapping a pie on another person's face. I see it as an insult rather than a funny action. :-(

And I mangle idioms all the time. :-D

Don't worry, English IS my first language and I don't understand a lot of idioms either. :o/ Proverbs usually make no sense to me at all b/c I have difficulty with abstract thought.

Barb

A local roadside flower/plant stand had a huge sign stating:
All Perrineals Half Price
Hahaha-wished i'd snapped a picture!

For those who aren't familiar...the "Perineal"(minus the second "r") area is the region between your pubic bone and your anus...simply stated, your CROTCH. Apparently crotches were half price that day ;o)) Maybe it was "NURSES WEEK" and they were offering a sale that only nurses would understand (intimately...groan).

Barb in Ontario

One of my pet peeves:

"All doors will not open at this station"

Really? Then how is anyone going to get off the train?

And another:

"Station X, last and final stop"

Just redundant. Earlier they say "Station X, next and final stop" and that makes sense.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/care.html

knotty,

irregardless is in my 1969 dictionary. It is nonstandard, or slang. It says it is a double negative, which is never acceptable except when the intent is clearly humorous.....or...I think in other words when someone is just wanting to talk and appear stupid.

sue

The thing that naggs me so is the possessive "their" used with "everyone".
Everyone is using it. That's the trouble.

Pitimpinai... make a sentence with "their"/possessive. I don't understand what you mean to say.

Barb

Pitimpinai, I do that one all the time - slap my wrist!

Barb, here's an example:
Everyone took their toys and went home. Should be: Everyone took his toys and went home. (I think...gosh, it sounds weird, now...)
Same thing with no one, none, someone, somebody, etc. They're all singular.
Another conversational thing for me, sliding into what I write/type.

Angel

:-D
Yup. Singular.

But isn't "their"/possessive, singular AND plural at the same time, just like the words "geese" and "moose"? I've never heard of it being incorrectly used when plural.

Barb
(who used "But" at the beginning of the sentence ;o))

Here's one I don't understand either...

I often hear people say "priorize" instead of "prioritize". I look it up in my dictionary and it's not there. Then I look on the internet and get over 51,400 hits on the alleged word. IS it a word? I still think not but I'm not sure.

Barb
southern Ontario, CANADA

Here lies the problem.....

On a forum, such as this, we have a tendency to use what I will call "conversational grammar", that is, how we would say it...not how we would write it...

Does that make sense??

If I was writing a research paper or other type of report, it would be "fine tooth combed" for errors.

I experience pain whenever I read "winter sew" or "winter sewing". I feel better now. -Thanks

Ha ha, susanc, my husband is always getting me with the opposite - 'So, what's all this sowing stuff about, again?' Only he pronounces it like COW! Of course, he knows perfectly well what he's doing, he just likes to see me roll my eyes, I guess!

We were talking the other night about the whole 'he/she' issue, and he said he'd recently read something about 'they' becoming acceptable as a singular substitute. If this is true (and I don't know that I trust his source, since it wasn't me, LOL, yeah, right!), then 'their' would have follow along. So you may be right, Barb! Maybe everyone DID take their toys and go home! :o)
I had to look up 'priorize', I had never seen that before. I found a site that talked about it,though. According to them, even 'prioritize' didn't show up until the sixties!

Webkat, you're right, I see the forums as very conversational, like talking to friends, not writing research papers. I don't think this is a mean-spirited thread, I just find language interesting, and love to talk about it with non-stuffy (is that a word?) folks!

Here is a link that might be useful: Scroll down to

That link should have read, "Scroll down to Getting our 'prioritizes' right"

I don't know about ya'll, (that's right, I'm in the south, everything goes here), but grammar is not even on my list of pet peeves. My pet peeve is when the bag boy puts my loaf of bread in the bag with canned goods and smashes it!!!

Another good one is while in traffic, I always leave a couple car lengths between me and the guy in front. The jerk behind me is on my a**, then he passes me must to get up in front and take my "stopping space".

Or when someone calls your home and it's a wrong number and they just hang up with out an "I'm sorry", especially when it's late.

The biggest pet peeve is when I park my 4x4, (which I'm still very proud of) way out in the parking lot, the very furthest spot I can find. I come out of the store and find a P.O.S parked right up on my door!! Thus 6 door dings!!!!!

So to me, grammar doesn't bother me. It's rude and uncurteous people.

Nancy

Webkat...why would it be "fine tooth combed"? That's an action. "Fine tooth comb" is a thing. I've never heard anyone say "fine tooth combed" before... is that a common phrase where you live?

Singingcrk...thanks for the link

Seedbandito... I agree! Rude people really irk me too. In my small town I often see kids or teenagers throw huge bags of fast food garbage out the back window of their car but what's worse is that the adults in the front seat seem to think it's no big deal. Our North American culture is sorely lacking in the finer niceties, morals, manners and etiquette that was so stringently taught up until the last century. I'm a working mom myself but it seems that this lack of social teaching/learning seems to coincide with both parents being out of the home and working. It's a shame we can't go back to teaching the simple manners and niceties once again.

Barb

There was a Dateline episode the other night on how rude people (all over the world) are becoming. Sad.

One of my pet peeves is how telemarketers call and address you by your first name, as if they know you. I suppose that's a marketing trick - but it just ticks me off.

And I have a question: why do so many people use the word "loose" when they mean "lose"??

PV

pvic...what did they talk about on the dateline show?

Barb

Barb - correction: it was Primetime. Generally they talked about how polls show that 70-80% of Americans believe we are getting ruder, citing cell phone usage in public, reality shows(!), email, etc.

But they said that rudeness is a lot like fashion, in that it changes with the times; what was considered rude, say a hundred years ago, may be considered acceptable behavior today.

And that there are periods in history when the feeling that rudeness is pervasive grows more intense:

"Questions tend to come up during periods of change. Periods of immigration, periods where technology transforms the way we live, periods where there's a big population explosion, so there are more people encountering each other on a daily basis. All of those kinds of situations, I think, create a shift and  a reinvestigation of manners and what they are."

They also talked quite a bit about Japan, that most "polite" nation, experiencing a real surge of rudeness, which they attribute to the growing influences of the western world (aka America). And how they are trying to legislate the "rudeness" away.

Bottom line: rudeness seems both dehumanizing and threatening no matter what era; manners are what bind people.

OK, there it is. More than you probably wanted to know.

PV

PV...thanks... sadly though I don't see where the pendulum can swing the other way and bring back some of the lovely etiquette that has gone by the wayside. One of the habits that I think bothers me most is poor table manners. For Chinese New Year we went to a restaurant and looking around the dining room almost 100% of the men and young adult males were wearing hats/ballcaps at the table. My husband says "so what?" and that just makes me sad to think that society just has no mind to have any social graces at all.

Barb

Here you go farmerbell: ¢

Next on the list: fewer v. less

More and more I hear everyone using "less" when they are talking about a NUMBER of items. "Less" is for 'lumps' of things...like mashed potato for instance. "Less" mashed potato, not fewer.

However, if you had a bag of potatoes, and you didn't need that many, you'd want FEWER potatoes, not LESS potatoes.

Then there's noocular, joolery, and febyooary.

The list goes on...

For those of you who hate to have typos in your posts, Google has a spell checker included in the google toolbar. It is a quick and easy download and you can search google (and google images) right from your toolbar.

Sam (a grammar and spelling snob who does not always type very well)

I dislike the use of "orientate" instead of "orient". I know they are both derivations of the french "orienter", but it still bothers me. Lea

Lea... I dislike the use of "orientate" as well. I'm a nurse and as such use the word "orient" a great deal ie. "oriented in all three spheres" We also "orient" new nurses to the unit yet everyone tells them they are getting "orientated"...

Barb

Barb,

Perhaps that is the root of my disdain for the word "orientate". I was a nurse for 20 years, though I haven't practiced for almost two years.

Lea

I use "anyhoo" and "anyways" all the time, and do it on purpose. I misspell lots of things, sometimes without noticing, but most of the time I go back and correct myself. When I am posting hear or "penning" emails, I use coloquial, vernacular, and slang with the uttmost abandon =) I also use smiley's as punctuation as frequently as possible, more so when I'm in my cups. I abbrvi8 whenever possible, as sometimes I have much to say and little time. I also appreci8 it when others use abbrv's cuz I also have lil time to read (sometimes) I miss and misuse punctuation whenever possible.... sometimes a period just won't due, and an ! is just 2 much ;) I create my own abrrv's and expect others to understand me... mostly cuz I figure if if make's sense to me anyone can figure it out =oP I make notes of my laghter in posting "hehehe" "lol" "rotfl" and occasionally "lmfao!" Pll ~ life is short, you can be intelligent and post like an illitterate... I won't mind one bit! (that time and ! was warranted, hehehe!)

Oh, my pet peeve~ rambling posts ;) hehe!

gee-dubya

garden witch, :o) !!!

I truly feel bad for the anyone who has to rely on the closed captioning text on TV. The words(?) scroll so fast and are so badly spelled that I can hardly figure out what's going on. I see this in the gym where the sound is not on, and cain alwaiz tail whan someone speaks with an accent. Makes me wonder if there is a person or just a computer doin the texting. Why can't that be checked? Especially if the same news story is run 100 times a day.

Just my peeve. I'd rather be gardening.
Susan

Great thread! I should of joined GW earlier. (sic)

Has anyone read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss? Is the koala in a tree or a bar?

singingcrk: I think the dialect in the Carolinas you're thinking of is Gullah, a blend of English and African languages spoken on islands off the coast, and originating with slaves. The isolation of the islands has kept the language alive.

A recent program on my local public radio station had an interview with, among others, the author of "The Atlas of North American English" who says that, contrary to common opinion, accents are actually becoming more pronounced.

One might and may listen online from the archive page. Scroll down to the show titled "Ayuh, Linguistically Speaking" from March 9th.

Here is a link that might be useful: Linguists & Dialect Coach

"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" - great book...the title alone says it all - if you put a comma after the "eats", then the bear "eats, shoots and Leaves" instead of eating shoots and leaves....make sense? It is a funny book!

My grammar might be bad but I understand math.

Why is "Bra" singular

and "Panties' is plural ???

All Perrineals Half Price

How about "Eat here and get gas" ?

or "We buy junk and sell antiques"

:-)

I apologize if this one has been stated. But it has been getting on my nerves lately as I've seen it in numerous posts.

Advise/Advice.

Solana and gardenjen, I've been wanting to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, it's on my list. Of course, now I have to add the other book you mentioned. Can you guess that my list is endless?
I don't think the dialect was Gullah, I'm pretty sure it was on the mainland, and had Native American influence...blurry memory here. I don't think it was as pronounced as some dialects, either, some of the difference was more in the accent. Not sure. Still interesting.

mao_tse_mom, math has never been my strong point, but I love to have light bulb math moments! Loved algebra, because I like logic and puzzles. And logic puzzles. :o)

Here's one in the spirit of being helpful, and it applies to winter sowing:

Opaque does not mean transparent, they are opposites. (I think we get this one confused because we may remember hearing the definition in school, and it was usually presented at the same time as transparent or translucent.)
I only mention this because sometimes folks talk about using opaque lids 'n' such, when I think they mean a lid that lets light through.

:o)
Angel

mao tse mom-- High five. I'm a math idiot. Really.
I was the copy editor for my high school newspaper, which meant it was my responsibility to find and correct all mistakes. Which was fun for me because I used to (when in a teenage snit of some sort) walk through the aisles of the local drug store, sharpie marker in hand, and do corrections. My mom refused to go into a store with me after a while. "Why is everybody so friggin' dense?" I would complain...
But I got off my high horse when I realized that if everybody were 'just like me' then we'd have a whole big mess on our hands... I cringe when my 10 year old asks me for math help and it's not because I don't want to be bothered! Luckily my husband is a mechanical engineer-- he can help with all the math stuff!

Amanda 'romando'

I got a chuckle out of our local KFC that had a sign for a while reading, "$400 Value Meals Now Here."

I've learned to read past/through typos on posts on GW or elsewhere, although I do have a handful of pet peeves. It's like talking with friends - their grammar isn't as important as their friendship and what they have to share.

What really gets me, though, are typos in articles on news websites. You'd think that people in the information business would be scrupulous about spell-checking and editing. Typos in books bug me too - sometimes I think I should have been a copy editor instead of a Special Ed teacher (and now home schooling mother - my kids are NOT going to like having me correct their papers someday!).

About ESL (English as a Strange Language!), our son has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. One of the characteristics of AS is being very literal-minded and having difficulty understanding euphemisms/figures of speech. We are ALWAYS having to "define" figures of speech for him, because they just make NO SENSE to him at all. The expressions "Cat got your tongue?" and "I have a frog in my throat" really grossed him out until we explained them. Sometimes I feel like I have to be a walking dictionary of American colloquial speech. (And there are several good dictionaries for figures of speech available, some written specifically for people who have AS. Who knew? I've GOT to get one!)

Laurel (who is a transplant from OH to NY, and still occasionally can't figure out whether to say "soda" or "pop" when referring to a soft drink)

Wonderful thread! A few things that came to mind while reading this is people who say "sodie" for a soft drink or baking soda, "front chard" in place of front yard, "zink" when it should be sink, "unthaw" for thaw and the list goes on and on. There is a book out "How to Speak Southern" that is hilarious.

Don't stop now, this is great!

Nancy

not sure if this was mentioned before, but when we first came to the South (coming from Westchester, NY), we heard the expression "might could" and that was sounded a bit odd to me - either you might do it, or you could do it - but might could? If someone could explain that to me - I "might could" understand it - - (see what I mean?) Carrie

When we first moved to South Carolina from D.C., we kept hearing folks say to us, "Come see us." We weren't being invited anywhere, although it sounded like it. Not sure about this, Carrie, but "might could" sounds like an effort to be deferential.

Okay, here's a pet peeve: saying "surely" when "sure" would do. As in "I surely will." One more peeve is the improper use of the pronouns "I" and "me." (Hope I put the period in the right place!) On one of my favorite gardening programs the host is always saying, "Something something to landscapers Mike, Jay and I."

I really try to not notice grammatical errors on signs or in the newspaper, but I find it impossible to be patient about mistakes in print. I recently checked out Sunbelt Gardening: Success in Hot-Weather Climates (don't know how to make italics, sorry) by Tom Peace, and it was so filled with grammatical errors, I became angry. Hate when that happens!

When I lived in Florida, I saw a farm field with a sign that read "PAIS".

What they had for sale was field peas. I think it was adorable, and I've never forgotten it.

Mary

Mary, I don't get it -- waaaah!

Dirty, Pais are Peas with a Florida "country" southern accent.

They just spelled it exactly the way it sounded to them.

Mary

Seen recently in SEVERAL places:

"Pansys $X.xx"

X-rated posies?

I have another forum pet peeve. Posts that start with "um."