Comments on: What are the funniest-sounding English words to speakers of other languages?

Question: What are the funniest-sounding English words to speakers of other languages?

paul_smatatoes — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:42:43 -0800

What are the funniest-sounding English words to speakers of other languages? If you grew up speaking another language (for some weird reason) what English words still make you giggle?

By: creasy boy

creasy boy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:44:15 -0800

I've been told that 'gorgeous' sounds ugly.

By: The World Famous

The World Famous — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:44:34 -0800

Bumper-to-bumper.

By: creasy boy

creasy boy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:45:36 -0800

And I've been told that 'orangutan', if you pronounce it the way I do: orang-utang, is a laugh riot.

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:06:36 -0800

Like any language, it's not the words so much as the turns of phrases and colloquialisms. If you find yourself "chomping at the bit," make sure you're not headed for a "wild-goose chase."

Compound words, taken literally, are also funny. A "butterfly" has nothing whatsoever to do with dairy products moving through the air of their own accord.

By: electroboy

electroboy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:18:49 -0800

A portugese woman I met was very amused by "duck", as in the bird.

By: chickaboo

chickaboo — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:20:17 -0800

I like the opposite approach. "Flipped out" in German is pretty funny - ausgeflipt

By: fake

fake — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:20:34 -0800

shishkabob in Russia.

By: Gregamell

Gregamell — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:22:56 -0800

i was in germany a while back, and they had trouble/got a kick out of saying 'squirrel' and 'towel'. a squirrel stole my towel

By: wafaa

wafaa — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:26:35 -0800

A Somali friend of mine cracked up at the word "puke". He walked around all day at work, mumbling "puke...puke..." and giggling.

By: enjoytroy

enjoytroy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:38:24 -0800

I lived in Latin America for years and never knew a Spanish speaker who could get "wrought iron" out without laughing.

By: parmanparman

parmanparman — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:39:15 -0800

Fannypack.

By: lain

lain — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:51:56 -0800

Cool Papa, it was originally called a "flutterby", which, taken literally, makes alot of sense.

By: andrew cooke

andrew cooke — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:55:19 -0800

my (spanish speaking) partner (who is otherwise a very smart individual, i promise) finds the sentence "the nose knows" very amusing.

By: hsoltz

hsoltz — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:03:09 -0800

I once had an Austrian friend laugh heartily at my guacamole instructions: mash an avocado until it is "mushy." She explained that mushy sounds like a German slang word for the female genitalia. Perhaps some of these phrases are funny because of how they translate?

By: perpetualstroll

perpetualstroll — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:05:19 -0800

I had a Spanish roommate who had a hilarious time with the word stapler, partially because he had a lot of trouble pronouncing it.

By: bluebird

bluebird — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:09:11 -0800

Thistlethwaite.

By: msali

msali — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:13:26 -0800

I have always been fond of the way the word 'kerosene' sounds in English.

By: dmo

dmo — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:29:07 -0800

Payday sounds like peidei (I farted) in Portuguese. Several students got a laugh out of that.

By: rhoticity

rhoticity — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:41:19 -0800

My high school Spanish teacher found the word "wool" particularly gigglish--and we asked him to say it often, because it sounded pretty damn funny to us too.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:46:45 -0800

My Argentine friends found the word "goggles" hugely amusing and would say it as often as they could. Which was often.

By: LordSludge

LordSludge — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:55:59 -0800

poop.

By: Brian James

Brian James — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:02:50 -0800

A couple Spanish (as in Spain) friends of mine giggle whenever they hear "insipid." It is a cognate in both En and Sp, but for some reason they think the way we (or at least I) say it is funny.

By: daravida

daravida — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:11:44 -0800

"queue"

By: Johnny Assay

Johnny Assay — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:21:04 -0800

<derail>

Cool Papa, it was originally called a "flutterby", which, taken literally, makes alot of sense.

Not according to the OED:

f. BUTTER + FLY; with Old English buttorfléoge cf. Dutch botervlieg, earlier botervlieghe, modern German butterfliege. The reason of the name is unknown: Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement.

</derail>

By: rainy

rainy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:42:06 -0800

second puke. poop is funny whether you're foreign or not, it's just inherently funny. Russian has a lot more funny words than english. Russian really sucks for technical terms though, and is generally hard to speak fluidly, as in, very demanding..

By: czechmate

czechmate — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:49:09 -0800

My husband thinks the word "pumpkin" is amusing.

For me, he sounds hilarious when he says "penguin". I look forward to hockey season because I hear him say it the most then.

By: divabat

divabat — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:37:56 -0800

creasy boy: that's because it comes from two Malay words, "orang" and "hutan" ("man of the forest") so hearing anyone say it the way you say it makes us Malaysians laugh at your Western ineptitude. :P

For me it'd be "puce". Just sounds weird.

By: doctorpiorno

doctorpiorno — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 14:33:11 -0800

Personally, I firmly believe "teetotaler" is one of the funniest words ever conceived in any language.

For French speakers, "douche" is a laughing riot.

Oh, and us Spanish speakers always have fun with the word "constipated". Every Spaniard I know has, at some point, made seemingly puzzling remarks about the cold weather being somehow related to the state of their digestive system.

By: Dee Xtrovert

Dee Xtrovert — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:15:47 -0800

"Butterfly" was not originally "flutter by" - that's a false etymology and one which doesn't even make much sense if one knows much about how these sorts of words form. As in most Germanic languages, the suffix "-fly" was appended to many other roots to describe insects which, well, fly. For instance, the Icelandic word for a "bee" is really a "bee-fly" in that language, if I'm not mistaken.

There's a dispute over the origins of the "butter-" part, which may or may not refer to butter (some of these theoretical origins relate to the idea that the creatures were witches who stole butter, the color of a common species and the color of the insect's excrement.)

As a native Bosnian speaker, I always found "helmet" to be a funny word, though I can't describe why.

By: raheel

raheel — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:29:19 -0800

Not exactly on-topic, but there is actually a song in an Amitabh Bachhan movie about the inconsistencies of English pronunciation – as in P-U-T is "put" but B-U-T is "but". When I was a little boy it was hilarious to think about it. Hindi, Urdu is much more WYSIHYP (what you see is how you pronounce).

By: ludwig_van

ludwig_van — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:04:14 -0800

"A mown lawn."

By: nakedsushi

nakedsushi — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:13:15 -0800

When I was small and new to the English language, my English-speaking cousins and I were playing a game of hide-and-seek, where I was the seeker. I had found every one of my cousins except one and was having trouble. One of my cousins asked, "Give up?" I said, "What?" He said, "give up?" and that repeated for about ten times.

I was so confused at what "give up" meant. It sounded like a whole word to me, but it also sounds like a sound that would accidentally escape your throat during a hiccup or something.

By: gemmy

gemmy — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:15:09 -0800

There are a couple of words I really find strange and funny sounding:

custard/mustard
gallivant
retch
sloppy/droopy, and pretty much every word with a double o.

Language is a funny thing. After almost 20 years speaking English every day, I still have two words that I just can't get right:

1. Wrist - because in Swedish the word "vrist" means "ankle".
2. The letter "E" - because in Swedish if you say "eee", that's the sound of spelling out the letter "I". Makes taking messages at work a huge pain...

By: miz brown

miz brown — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:15:36 -0800

Cacophany.

*giggles to self*

By: tomble

tomble — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:06:45 -0800

"chomping at the bit"

that would be "champing at the bit".

As a kid I spent a lot of time laughing at the word `barf' when an American student at my primary school told me. I had never heard it before.

By: santojulieta

santojulieta — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:21:51 -0800

I was in choir with two lovely women from Korea when I was in college, and I realized during a rehearsal for a Christmas concert that they were calling shepherds something different. SheFerds. Ha!

By: jouke

jouke — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:51:54 -0800

I have to agree that spelling out vowels when you're speaking a mixture of english and dutch, in my case, can be confusing: talking about the game company EA it sounds as if you're spelling out IE.

The way an r in english sounds like a vowel makes words that consist of r's and vowels, like 'roar', very strange and hard to understand.

Idiomatic expressions are always a source of wonderment and confusion between languages and it's an easy amusement or mistake to make to translate idiomatic expressions literally. Here are some examples of idiomatic expressions seen from a foreign standpoint:
You can say that again - I have to say it again?
He takes the cake - He's hungry?
That's not my cup of tea - Whose is it then?
It looks like rain - Is it watery?

To see the, admittedly weak, humour of these literal translations you have to speak both languages:
Make that the cat wise (=I don't believe you)

For a while it was popular to translate tough streetwise slang from hiphop and rap literally. Which is totally ridiculous. Hé, moederneuker! Broeder van de wijk!

And then there's the the joy for small children of words that sound the same but have a very different meaning in your own language. When I was seven on holiday in Ireland I was indignant that this man was saying things to my dad about my mother like "is your broad not with you today?". My father explained he did not have punch the man because 'wife' does not equal 'wijf'.

There are sniggers to be had for childres from decent english words that sound like indecent dutch words;
"bill" in english = "buttock" in dutch
"cut" in english = "cunt" in dutch
"lull" in english = "dick" in dutch

By: jouke

jouke — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:53:02 -0800

~~childres~~ children

By: soundofsuburbia

soundofsuburbia — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 06:52:40 -0800

The sentence "I buy pink sheets" kind of sounds like "aj baj pink skit" if you say it in swedish which then sort of translates back into "ouch poo pee shit". And that is, of course, hysterical if you're in kindergarten!

By: mjbraun

mjbraun — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:02:19 -0800

Soundofsuburbia: I recall that the full version of that phrase is "I buy pink sheets for a kiss" though I can't for the life of me recall what "kiss" is a homophone for in Swedish...

By: qvtqht

qvtqht — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:56:39 -0800

This isn't English per se, but "Mazda" never ceased to sound dirty to me. (I'm Russian.)

By: qvtqht

qvtqht — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:57:08 -0800

Brilliant question, by the way. I'll post more when I remember them.

By: LordSludge

LordSludge — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:07:27 -0800

Exchange between me and my then-girlfriend, fresh-off-the-boat Danish girl:

me: The movie was good, but the effects were pretty cheesy.
her (puzzled): "Cheesy?" You mean... like... cheese??

By: gemmy

gemmy — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:20:21 -0800

though I can't for the life of me recall what "kiss" is a homophone for in Swedish

Same as "pink", it's a homophone for urine/to urinate, although even more widely used.

By: twistofrhyme

twistofrhyme — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:30:00 -0800

i asked this same question of an indian cab driver once. i brought it up because i'd recently encountered the indian girls' name POOJA, which of course is kind of unfortunate in english. he told me it was a very respectable hindu name that means "an offering to god".

in return, he said the english surname LUNN translated as a vulgar slang for "penis" in his language (which was, i forget, maybe hindi?). he then giggled and told me that on his first day of north american cab-driving school, the teacher introduced himself as jim lunn, and an entire roomful of prospective cabbies burst out laughing. for the rest of the year, he said, they teased each other: "what exactly is jim lunn going to teach you tonight?"