Is there an English word or phrase that native speakers don’t blink at that sounds odd/funny/rude/repulsive to ESL students?
"Sperm whale" always sounds a bit funny to me, but I don't know whether native speakers find it funny, too.
"You can't have your cake and eat it, too." I understand the underlying logic, but it always seems a bit weird, since 1). you can eat half a cake; 2) if you don't eat a cake, you will no longer have a cake in a few days anyway; 3) it's a very long phrase for a short idea; and 4) the fact that "have" can also mean "eat".
"blow job": seems to be the opposite of what the job entails.
"first off": Why the "off"?
"ladyfinger": I understand the finger part, but "lady" finger? A bit cannibalistic, isn't it?
* "You can't have your cake and eat it, too": might be better phrased as "can't eat your cake and have it, too". The idiom is stuck in its given form, however.
* blow job: I have read this etymologically arose from "below job". there are occasional humorous anecdotes related to native speakers misunderstanding it as well
* first off: never really thought about this before. I would suppose it comes from metaphorically popping the first of many arguments off of the speakers mental list.
* ladyfinger: it meant long like fingers, the lady part meant to indicate slender or delicate. there was a plant called ladyfingers as well
It can still mean borrow.
"fag" obviously has different meanings, but the phrase just wouldn't parse for most Americans.
I'll disagree about it being rare; I hear the phrase at least a few times per week (I work in a place where people frequently ask other people for rides, so perhaps that's relevant)
The other day I realized I hadn't eaten basic tier fast food in 15 years. That could be anecdotal evidence for some general trend ("fast casual! increasing consumer health consciousness!"), or it could just be me.
I'd be willing to bet a totally irresponsible amount of money that if I went out to bars in Atlanta tonight, I would hear someone say "bum a cigarette" before closing time rolled around.
"I was broke, so I bummed around Oklahoma for a few weeks..."
Kerouac's On The Road might be a good example.
But 99% of the time I hear "bum a ride" or "bum a smoke" and I have never heard a third (verb) meaning in America.
At least you've lived around. One of the things that amazed me when I first came to and was traveling the US is seeing Americans in one state say some phrase, only to go to another state and have those Americans claim it was never said in America.
People really like to absolutely generalize based o their ow necessarily limited experiences.
I didn't intend my comment to mean it doesn't exist, more that if it does, it's probably a very regional thing, based on not having heard it in the various cities I've lived in.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verbification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)#Ve...
and also, though it is attributed to UK
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bum
Verb:
bum (present participle bumming, past participle bummed)
(UK, transitive, colloquial) To sodomize; to engage in anal sex.In British English, the phrase means "have you got a cigarette (fag) you'd be willing to give me for free (bum)?"
I think we just usually learn it early enough that we don't tend to think much about what the words mean individually. More like it's one word that just means the meat product, or same product on a bun.
- Toad in the hole
- bangers and mash
- bubble and squeak
And that’s before we even move on to Cockney rhyming slang nor other of the more extreme colloquials.
> - Toad in the hole
Sausages in batter. Not sure where the sausage==toad equivalence comes from - its not used anywhere else.
> - bangers and mash
Sausages with mashed potato. This one has the most meaningful name, assuming you know that bangers == sausages (which is a common equivalence).
> - bubble and squeak
Left-over potatoes and other veg, fried up. Again, this term is only used in this context.
All of these are classic Brit cuisine.
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It's an older version of "under" I guess. The weird thing is that the word "substance" has such a similar looking construction, because it literally means that which stands beneath.
English in general uses a lot of seemingly random direction words in phrases, like "party down", "man up", "buckle up", etc.
Which comes to English from Old English and its Germanic origins. 'Unter' and 'Standen' are the Germanic equivalents today, signifying the original intent, to stand together on something.
'Comprehend' from the Normans' French (and Latin before that) is much easier to grok für Ausländer in this case.
Also "could care less" actually means "couldn't care less" which is just as easy to say so why make the change? And how?
It's questionable as to whether it's nice or not.
Maybe it's more of an acquired taste, but I don't find it particularly refreshing or good, and only drink it for the nostalgia (which is really just nostalgia of family vacations - I only lived in Scotland as a toddler). I don't drink a ton of Coke (depending on year, Coke and Irn Bru alternate top soda sales in Scotland) either, but on a very hot day, after a long bike ride or run, a small Coke hits the spot.
It's in the same neighborhood as Irn Bru.
I'd say it's more of a light energy drink and more similar to Tizer and other "made up flavour " carbonated drinks.
Why would a man eat a shark? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Like the popular song by Hall & Oates, she's a man-eater.