>Anyway, a friend of mine put her foot in her mouth with this word.
>She went to the US as a high school exchange student, and of she'd
>been taught in school that a "rubber" in English is an eraser, and not
>about any other sense of the word. On her first day in her American
>school, she turned around and asked the guy sitting behind her if he'd
>got a rubber... I suppose this reinforced the general reputation of
>Swedish women abroad :-)
An English friend had a similar embarrassing experience. She had to
get up early and decided to ask a neighbour to bang on her door and
get her out of bed. So she asked her neighbour to "knock her up" in
the morning. He was, naturally, a bit taken aback at this foreign
woman asking him quite matter-of-factly to impregnate her out of the
blue... Endless opportunities for cross-cultural hilarity... Others
might include the small waistbags that North Americans call
"fannypacks", much to the amusement of the British. Or Canadian "homo"
milk that Americans have a good chuckle over.
- Neil K.
-- 49N 16' 123W 7' / Vancouver, BC, Canada / n_k_guy@sfu.ca