Languages and dialects

I had no idea there were so many. Of course, I’ve come across the four you mention but it seems I’ve many hundreds still to seek out.

FWIW, My lunch sandwich was Wiltshire cured ham, using meat from free range Hampshire breed boars.

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They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is never truer than when two people with different. native languages “agree”. I have stopped short of disaster several times when making plans that sound in agreement but are not. Before sealing a deal, I try to rephrase the details to make sure we are both saying the same thing. It’s amusing but scary when each person thinks his mastery of the other language is better than it really is.

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Re: Knocking someone up

What does that mean other than getting someone pregnant?

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I found it interesting that Catalan has closer ties to the language and dialects in Nice and Turin, than it does to Spanish.

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I think that in Britain, it just means knocking on someone’s door for a visit.

It could mean that. Or I could knock up a curry for dinner - to do something perhaps without finesse or effort.

I have fallen foul of this one on HO or, perhaps, on Chowhound.

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Wild boar sausage and wild boar ham are amazingly lovely.

“Knocking up a lady” = Getting a woman pregnant …

Very colloquial old vulgar statement …

It has alot of French symbols too … (ç ö, à, è )

The Catalan Pyrenées, the frontiers of France are also Catalan speaking.

For years, I didn’t realize that if an American is WILLING to do something, a Brit is HAPPY to do it. Very tactful of the latter, who may well be thinking, “Oh, all right, I’ll do it even though I’d rather snorkel in a sewer.”

It’s common slang in Canada, I would not considered it especially vulgar. It isn’t the Queen’s English, but I use it fairly regularly when discussing my cousins’ children. Several of them got knocked up during the Pandemic.

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Me, neither. I can’t think of any terms for pregnancy that I would consider vulgar. The cause of pregnancy, sure, but not pregnancy itself. (I bet there are some, though, and I just don’t know them.)

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Preggers. In a family way. In trouble. Gone to live with her aunt. Semester abroad.

Semester abroad doesn’t work as well once the people who are preggers are over 35 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Bun in the oven.

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In the club. In the family way. Up the duff.

I wonder if these various euphemisims date back to Victorian times when it would not have been polite to use such direct words as “pregnant”. We seem to have a rich fund in English to draw on.

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I majored in linguistics as an undergraduate. The science of language. I did take an extraordinary amount of German while I was at it because I had an uncle who lived in Germany and I wanted to move there after my baccalaureate and teach English as a second language. Didn’t research that very well, because the Germans wanted British English taught to their kids. So I went back to University got a master’s in Speech and Hearing Sciences and spent a miserable career as an Audiologist. My biggest regret is that I didn’t learn French. My husband speaks it fluently but without support of much vocabulary. I get by with culinary French, but I don’t speak French in public. They seem to have only 11 letters and pronounce 3 of them…

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I had the best work study job my last year at Ohio State. I was and still am a language geek. I worked for the woman who was head of the TESOL - I was an undergrad. She liked Friday afternoons off. She handed her last class to me at the end of the week and I taught slang and colloquial English to graduate students from all over the planet - Chinese, Israeli, Korean, Pakistani, South American. They were all there studying something else to go into their professions but we had so much fun. I always came to class with a subject and words around it, they all came to class to ask questions about what they heard and couldn’t figure out. These were some really smart people - engineers, mathematicians, physicians…It was the UN of FUN. I tutored a few of them on my own outside of class. It was interesting how their own language interfered with learning the one I could offer to them. I don’t mean that in a political way, just as a social scientist. They were all older than me, and some of them had been through wars to be in that classroom.

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“A cat can have kittens in the oven but that doesn’t make them biscuits.”

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