April 06, 2003
It's all in the detail
My husband has a very strong New Zealand accent which, even after all these years, can lead to some classic misunderstandings between us.
Husband: Can you give me the detail?
Deb: Detail? What detail?
Husband: The blue one.
Deb: Huh? Blue what?
Husband: Over by the stove! The blue one!
Deb, very confused: Huh? Detail of what?
Husband: Not 'detail'! The detail! Detail!
He storms over to the stove, grabs the blue cloth off the oven handle and waves it irately in the air.
Deb, sheepishly: Oh. Tea tow-el.
:D Took me a couple of reads to understand this. Very funny. x)
Posted by: Jenni at April 6, 2003 01:11 PMmy other half and I often have this same problem. although really, I think we both get a kick out of it.
Posted by: kim at April 7, 2003 04:33 AMThanks for making me smile ! I'm Dutch living in Belgium and I remember things like this... ;-)
Posted by: Morgaine at April 7, 2003 11:45 PMHi, I trackbacked you because I liked this piece of blogging:-) It's a very funny story!
My weblog is in Dutch, but I have started to use the extended entry for translating teh most important posts into english. You can recognize them easily, as it says in red 'click here to read this post in english". Not always a literal translation, but enough to give you the idea of what the post is all about.
For some reason the english version of my post hadn't reached the main page so I rewrote it and now it's there. Sorry folks.
Posted by: Sproet at April 8, 2003 10:33 AMi,
Mig was, I believe, wondering what I meant when I wrote my post about this one here. Well, to many Dutch people patriates and patriots will almost sound the same. Since "ex" means "no longer" , it occurred to me, that "ex-patriates" *could* sound, to foreigners, as "rockets that are no longer rockets" therefore then would be "dismantled rockets" (they work nog longer when dismantled). BUT: all this was based on the idea that the word "dismantle" means what I think it means...taking out the part of the rocket that makes it work.
Having a good working brain AND having ADHD (I have bothe:-) is sometimes and advantage because it means you have a good working FAST brain. It also means, at times, people just can't follow you, where you believe your words and thoughts to be completely logical. I never bothered to look up the word dismantle nor did it occur to me that I may have stepped on toes by shouting out a sentence like that. Sorry if I disturbed your peace...meant no harm.
Posted by: Sproet at April 8, 2003 07:50 PMhey thanks everyone. we really did have that conversation.
another good one is "bare" "bear" and "beer". Now, to most people, only the first two words are pronounced the same, but to my husband, they're all pronounced the same way.
frederique, thanks for linking to me, and for explaining the "dismantled rockets" reference.
Posted by: deb at April 8, 2003 09:06 PMYet to me, they're all a little different.
It's like pen, pan and pin.
Posted by: Waspish at April 9, 2003 06:27 AM