Every once and awhile, my group has these sinking ephiphanies about some language or cultural faux pas we may have made previously. Sometimes it comes days later. Some are worse than others.
Aimee was struggling to remember the word for husband in Japanese, which is otto, so we had one of our classic memory aid brainstorming sessions. I suggested that it's pronounced like auto, as in automobile, with a slight break between the two ts. Compared to some of the tricks we've concocted, this one is pretty lame. But it worked. And unbeknownst to us at the time, it may have saved Aimee from repeating the unfortunate mistake she's been making, including in the presentations we make to Rotary Clubs.
I was looking for something in my dictionary today, when my eyes glazed over the word for vomit.
You guessed it, it's oto (awe-to), which coincidentially is what Aimee has been calling her husband thus far.
Lesson learned: I'm hoping, for the sake of Aimee's marriage, the two words aren't as interchangable in her life as she has been making them in her speech.
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1 comment:
That's funny. Or not...
I remember one friend who went to Europe to ski. He would start any sentence in French by saying he was sorry for his bad use of the French language, and people would make funny faces that he didn't understand. He found out later that he had been saying: "please excuse my ugly French girlfriend."
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