Forum Ferreting: Speaking in Tongues
Half the fun of travel comes from experiencing a new culture--that's a whole lot easier when you know the language. But we've all had embarrassing verbal snuffs--and now there's a place to air them at the Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree travel forum, Speaking in Tongues.
There are questions that range from the practical: How to say thank you in Arabic, to the curious: How U.S. and U.K. rules differ when it comes to name changes after marriage. And then there are the miscommunications, like this one that caught our eye:
A colleague of mine mainly conducts qualitative research and found herself working on a project with people suffering from constipation ... It was difficult to get the discussion going and that respondents were giving unexpected answers. The problem, it turned out, was that half the group confused 'hard stools' with 'constipation'. that means that the 'hard stools' people thought they had constipation, but they hadn't - they only confused the softness (or lack of if) of their stools with constipation (hard stools people have regular bowel movements, no matter how hard their stool is while sufferers from constipation have irregular bowel movements and their stools can be of any hardness).
i just thought i let you know that some people don't know to differentiate between the two.
Apparently, if you've got a question, a comment (any kind of comment) or a story about language this is the forum to post it.
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· More Forum Ferreting [Jaunted]
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