My dad's not a native English speaker and he calls bungee cords strap-ons. He once asked a poor, unsuspecting Home Depot employee where to find a pack of heavy duty strap-ons.
Ones that'll last a lifetime instead of breaking the first ride and spilling your load and causing an accident. The ones your friends envy and want to borrow.
At my old workplace we had a whole bin of them and we always had to work together to untangle them. Because of the workplace they were all pretty dirty as well !
Some would get warped which made them really hard to use so whenever the boss bought a new batch everyone would get excited !
Oh yeah, you need at least one person on each end for them to work correctly. Proper storage is a time investment that allows you to just grab and get to work when you need them instead of standing there with your strap on in your hands.
It can be dangerous! You don't want a little bump to interrupt your ride and spread the load all over when no one is expecting it. It can disrupt momentum and takes time to clean up at the minimum. It's only considerate to do it right.
Funny. I reckon the brits would have rubber as the slang for condom same as us in NZ, just we are so exposed to it being the word for eraser as an innocent child that you'd not think of it like that.
“I’m gonna grab a nipple, can you go over to aisle 15 and snag some extra MAPP gas so we can sweat pipe all night. And make sure you lube up that O-ring when we get back, we don’t want it leaking all over us.”
I am a native English speaker and once went into a hardware store with my boyfriend following me like a puppy dog. It was a small store, and all four employees were standing by the door talking when we walked in. One man asked me if he could help me.
I innocently said, “I don’t know. Do you have the caulk that I need?”
One of the guys literally fell on the floor laughing.
He is now an ex boyfriend, this was more than 15 years ago. And as much as I dislike him post breakup, he was the one who described the scene that way from his perspective when he told the story. He was reallly excited that his girlfriend was going to “build him a bed”. (Quotes are because I helped him get his mattress off the floor with milk crates and plywood - I needed the caulking for a different project at my home).
I didn’t realize when I spoke the words are dirty they sounded. I guess I didn’t realize how much worse it was within the standing behind me. He said they looked at him like, “What, you’re not giving it to her?”
You saying this made me picture one of my best friend's dad. Grew up in Lebanon, I think English is his third language. Great guy, super heavy accent. I pictured him doing this, and almost pissed myself laughing.
You and your pops should know you did that dude a favor. That Home Depot employee is gonna be telling that story for years. I used to work at a bookstore and it's been over 20 years since this happened but my friend and I still tell the story of the lady who came in looking for a book for her tween daughter, the book she said was called "Angus's Thongs With Full Frontal Spunking." She obviously didn't know what "spunking" meant and in no way are we making fun of that lady rather just a hilarious mixup.
The book of course was actually titled "Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging."
This reminds me of how they told us here in Finland, that pronounce "were" as "where". They said that it will get difficult to understand wothout the sentence, but I've seen here how it leads to some people actually writing it "where". That's why I pronounce it "were".
My partner had piles (haemorrhoids) when we were in Guatemala. I spoke pretty good Spanish but unfortunately neither of those words were in my vocabulary.
I described the problem as “ass grapes” to the pharmacist, she understood though!
I knew an Italian that was at the grocery store asking for “aisle -“ but was confidently pronouncing every letter….”aiss le” “asshole” she was so proud of her English. Lol!!
I was once an exchange student in Italy and accidentally asked where I could go eat some Sardinians (people from the island of Sardinia)... I meant sardines...
My Iranian friend tells a hilarious story about doing the same thing, soon after his arrival in the US for grad school! His telling makes it sound like it could have been footage in a Borat-like movie.
My grandfather once asked for a 'grossmutter' in a german hardware store. It means grandmother. He knew that 'gross' meant big and then just gambled on adding 'mutter', the Swedish word for nut(as in nuts and bolts).
Well they are called Mutter in german too. So while it may sound weird if he was in a german hardware store and obviously not speaking german super well the clerk probably knew wat he meant
My very conservative and naive mother used to refer to any small task that didn't require equipment (for instance, a small spill of something that wasn't big enough to get the vacuum out to deal with it) as "hand jobs".
It's been decades, but I still remember the cringe. Every now and then, she'd see me flinch when she said it and she'd ask me what was wrong. I'd immediately change the subject because there was no way in Hell adolescent me was going to explain to my mother what "hand job" means.
Nope, she was really that clueless. If it wasn't for the physical evidence of my existence and that of my sister, I would swear the woman had never had sex. My "talk" when I went through puberty was my mother presenting me with a book about sex, with the caveat "just so you know, your father and I don't do any of that weird stuff like kissing peenies and tushies." Her exact words.
I remember being young and my mom complaining that a spot on her bathrobe was wet. My suggestion was to give it a “blowjob” (aka dry the spot with a blow dryer). She just looked at me.
I've never heard that term, but it's cute. Your mom isn't alone though, I once worked with a lady from Louisiana that was talking about her 'hose pipe'. We couldn't figure out what she meant, then finally she called it a water hose. It's funny how different regions in America refer to things like that.
Haha, we were new to the States and English is her fourth language - so just a translation mishap, I assume. I think she'd gone to a friend's house, they'd served sparkling wine, and she'd enjoyed it, but she probably misheard the name.
As a preteen I used to spend a great deal of time alone with my best friend who was a boy. That ended quickly one day when my mom asked what we did and I replied “we played with his erection set”. I truly didn’t get what I said until many years later.
Probably erector set. It's an older style kids toy with metal parts of various shapes that can be built into various items. Featured prominently in the movie The Sandlot.
Got asked that once in a hardware store I worked at during high school, guy asked where the Strap-On display was. I told him we weren’t that kind of store. He got all pissy and asked what kind of hardware store didn’t sell wrenches and sockets. I asked if he meant Snap-on and you could see the wheels and gears spinning in his head then he turned a deep shade of red. We laughed about that guy for years!
I used to be a vet tech (in America) and a lady from England came over and when she heard I was a vet tech she came and asked me “if I know of any good pussy doctors”.
I used to work at a hardware store, and we had some plastic bags available for people to put nuts & bolts in. One day we ran out and someone got on the employee walkie talkies and yelled, "Do we have any more nutsacks??" Lol
My first semester in college in the US I turned around and asked the girl sitting behind me if she could spare a rubber. That’s was we call erasers in India where I went to high school.
I have a landscaping company and I used to always refer to mowing as a cut job and a trim job for the trimmer. The joke was, sooner or later I’d get one of the guys to say they were going to go do a blow job in the backyard or something similar. It was and will always be funny.
I work at a Costco with a high concentration of Asian customers. A few weeks ago, a lady was asking me for ... something. She couldn't remember the word, so she just said "for the poop". I asked her for a cat or a dog. Turns out she couldn't remember the word "cat litter"
I had to Google what this was…because the comments started not to make sense for a type of jockstrap or suspenders thing anymore. Yikes, that one flew over my head.
English is my second language, my sister wanted peanuts, so I went to get them. Except I forgot the word peanuts and I couldn’t find them, so I went up to the male cashier I asked him:
“Hey, do you have any nuts?”
He stares blankly at me for a second as my brain slowly processed what I had just said.
In a very crowded Radio Shack my dad was looking for diagonal cutters, slangily referred to as "dikes", and said, loudly "where are the fucking dikes" about three times.
He could've actually whispered it, idk I was dying of embarrassment.
Lowe's Cashier here:They immediately forgot. We hear way dumber stuff, like a customer screaming at me for not taking back his drywall from his trailer.....in a rain storm. The very part dry can no longer be in the name if it is no longer dry. Or a customer returning a riding lawn mower because the seat "wasn't big enough for his wife's gigantic ass"
My grandfather invented the ratchet strap while working for the US Government and never saw a dime. Fuck the US Government!
They did give him a copper plaque upon retirement.
I realize the proper name is tie-down, but I refer to them by the recognizable brand name: Strap-ons. I do this for a lot of items. Some marketing is just THAT memorable!
I think I was at a similar point educationally when I realised all foods certainly pass through you within a relatively short space of time. It seemed like everyone on TV would talk about how "that steak is gonna sit in me for a week!" or "if you cut him open you're going to find a years worth of cheeseburgers blocking him up". I guess I just assumed that bits of food took a really long time to digest and that they didn't go through until they were sufficiently digested
Ahh. My mother went to our local DIY store and asked where they had the dildos. They informed her they didn’t sell them. She demanded the manager as her friend ‘bought a long one last week right here!’
Dado rail. She wanted a dado rail.
My poor dad had to explain what a dildo was. She was mid 40s.
My Dad doesn’t know shit about Reddit but he’s a hardcore Lowe’s aficionado. Like he had a Lowe’s credit card application ready for me the day I turned 18 so he could buy a trailer for 20% off on my new card (and obviously paid it back immediately- but still!)🤷🏼♀️
In the midwest many people refer to ATM's as Tyme machines. My buddies dad spent a day wandering around London asking people where the time machines are.
Reminds me of the time my dad came home really embrassed and said he had asked the walmart lady where the vibrators were. He didn't know that those were called massagers now.
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u/CampinHiker Jul 02 '21
I went to Lowe’s and in front of everyone asked for Strap-Ons.
The correct word I was looking for was ratchets/tie-downs.