potty mouth

I enjoy language, and as you can probably tell, I really enjoy the variations on English I encounter here. By and large I think I'm navigating the new waters pretty well, but at a work dinner last night I unwittingly dropped some kind of nasty bomb. An English woman across the table almost did a spit-take.

I still don't know the word in question means, because it's so bad no one would tell me. Here's the tricky part: If you say the word with a soft "g," it's offensive, but say it with a hard "g," no worries. Wait -- or is it the other way around? I'm just not going to venture near it at all.

There are few other phrases I've recently learned can go either way -- use the wrong preposition and the meaning changes entirely (usually to a very suggestive meaning). I'm at the point where I'm truly nervous about saying anything new. For this reason I've reverted back to "American" a little bit.

But another American at the table found that's not completely safe.

In America, especially in South Carolina, where she grew up, "to shag" means to dance. (The Shag is the state dance of South Carolina, even!) Here, "to shag" means, well, to have intimate relations with another person.

So when this woman said she learned to shag in a class when she was 13, and used to shag on the beach all the time, one older man gave a wicked smile and said, "Been there, done that."

I don't think I opened my mouth for the last 30 minutes of the evening. I said "goodbye" to everyone and hope I didn't cause any international incidents with that!

Comments

[Opie32958]

One time my buddy Chris, a plumber in Denver, was chatting online with a young lady in Australia we both know who is studying to be a minister. When she asked Chris what he'd been up to lately, he replied, "Man, I worked my fanny off today." Now, you and I both know what word the average American plumber would have used in place of "fanny." Chris, however, being a good Christian man, cleaned it up a bit for Lana, or meant to.

The conversation immediately plunged into a mess of embarrassment and confusion because Lana did not know that here in the States, fanny is a soft euphemism for the posterior, and Chris did not know that in Australia, it is a vulgarity referring to female genitalia.

[mapgirl]

Yep, that's what it means here, too -- something I figured out in a socially embarrassing way as well. Pretty much, if there's a slang for "down there," I've stumbled upon it!

m.