[ExI] New Bioscience Company Raises $15 Million to Revive Woolly Mammoth

[William Flynn Wallace]

Attempting to buy a loaf of bread in France, a guy attempted to put the
word into French.  So he said "One loaf of bread with no 'preservatif'".
All the staff started laughing.  In French a condom is called a
'preservatif'.  What we call a preservative is called a 'conservatif' in
French.  bill w

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 1:16 PM Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 2021-9-17 07:10, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:
> > This can produce odd-sounding results, especially if translating to a
> > foreign language using a foreign dictionary with vocabulary that you
> > are less familiar with, causing a native speaker to burst out
> > laughing.
>
> I've seen some odd ones in spam comments on my blog; some spambots use
> synonyms to try to avoid matching known patterns, and they're not fussy
> about which synonyms.
>
> Mom relayed this anecdote:
> Some Americans in Germany wanted to bake an apple pie.
> Their cookbook recommended using tart apples.
> So they looked up 'tart' in their English-German dictionary.
> The grocer was bewildered.
>
> Another kind of pitfall:
> Thirty years ago I was a book-herald in the SCA.
> Someone wanted to register a household with 'Amer' in its name,
> explaining that that is Russian for 'Honor'.  Some heralds knew enough
> Russian to think that ain't right.  We found a dictionary that said
>         HONOR: amer[ikanski] = HONOUR
>
> --
> *\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org
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>
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