[work/Arabic talk] the intro students got the word for "grass" today, as well as the explanation that yes, it does also mean marijuana in Arabic too, and were then lead in several rounds of sentences like "the grass in my house is of really good quality"

I love this professor lmfao

also today:

professor: "be careful with asking random Arabic speakers for vocab words, because sometimes people like to be mean and teach you all the swear words first. Ask me and I'll teach you nice, peaceful words!"

student: " 'corpse' and 'coffin' were in like the first ten words you taught us!"

lmao

we tried to do that with our chinese teacher

making her teach you all the good swear words or the other way around?

us: teach us how to swear in chinese
teacher: ... i'll teach you how to say 'bad egg'
us: ...okay fine, we'll take it. /proceed to spend ten minutes calling everyone a bad egg

trying to get her to teach us swears

HAHA that's cute

in high school we had a french teacher (he was a long-term sub and so the poor guy was hated on principle, because we all loved and missed the real teacher) who ended up banning some completely innocuous word from class, because he wouldn't teach us any swear words and so we adopted it as a euphemism

I can't remember what it was now; I think it was "penguin"?

lmao

but we were literally disallowed from using it in papers, on tests, in dialogues, etc.

that's awesome

-5 points for talking about penguins at all for any reason

tbh like 95% of the problem was that he made a huge deal of it, which of course made everyone want to use it more

man, our Spanish teacher taught us swears on purpose to evade the "native speakers might tell you a swear instead of the vocab word" trap

he also kept the class very on task so we did not get the calling each other swears thing

Our German teacher made the mistake of telling us that a vocab word (I think "table"?) was harmless in german but crude in her native language. Cue the class using that word at every opportunity.

what was her native language?

she was a chair

Flemmish, I think? We never did find out what was so crude about it.

Swear words are weird. One of my favorite Mexican pastries is called a "shell" for the pattern molded into the sugar crust; the same word is a crude euphemism for female genitalia in several South American countries....

(as a lesbian I appreciate this coincidence for the pun opportunities, but still)

Same goes with the word puto which is a delicious dessert in Philippine culture and it's a nasty curse in Spanish and Mexico if I'm not mistaken

For sure.

(I did not know that about the Philippines! Boy could that lead to some misunderstandings.)

A friend was surprised when I told them about it. He was familiar with the curse not the dessert

the ol "spotted dick" conundrum