Of course the sinistrosity is in my anglophone head. He's just saying "Mommy, that one, that one ..." in a simple paean to consumerism.>

e.g. "rare" is 'strange' in Dutch [adjective; the strange boy -> de rare jongen <vs> he is strange -> hij is raar]

A-ha... that explains t'other one. ;) And to think I actually knew this quote. That was a long time ago though. :s

<I found (and lost) a website full of false friends aka faux amis. One of my favorites was a Dutch advertising hoarding, with a sinister child and the slogan "Mama, die, die, die ...">

You were looking for this? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_...

<In most of Europe, a 'cafeteria' is a place to eat. <Annie> should be able to confirm that in Hungarian 'cafeteria' evolved in another direction.>

Well, I think that's a recent development - it hasn't been in my vocabulary in its apparent current usage of "fringe benefit". I vaguely recall having heard it used with the meaning of coffeehouse, cafe.

Sounds painful, doesn't it? But what would us males know about it?

An Irish woman I know asked her posh francophone Belgian in-laws if they were 'confortable' -- meaning, as in English, were they sitting comfortably. She got a strained look in reply ... and later learned the word applies to chairs, not people. She had asked 'are you comfortable to sit on?'

Indeed we are. Another classic is 'mist', which means 'dung, excrement' in German and 'fog, soft rain' in English. The people who launched a drink called Irish Mist failed to crack the German market.

Like the car called Nova. 'Does not go' in Spanish and (almost) French.

I heard there was a brand of Japanese whiskey called *Salmon Swim Bladder* but that could be an urban mist ...

Nine planets, whatever next? Kuijper belt objects and the Thing from the Oort Cloud?

Is that my cue to mention that since the relegation from planet & moon status, Pluto and Charon are considered a twin system? ;p

Umm, that's not right, I believe... the transmission should play at normal speed (though likely with many disturbances), it's just that it would take the whole movie several years to arrive, after being transmitted from Terra (I'm too lazy to look up just how many at the moment), and of course double the time if you have to order the movie first. :s

*Sigh* too much bother. Guess taking along a few tonnes of books and chess sets will have to do.

<An Irish woman I know asked her posh francophone Belgian in-laws if they were 'confortable' -- meaning, as in English, were they sitting comfortably. She got a strained look in reply ... and later learned the word applies to chairs, not people. She had asked 'are you comfortable to sit on?'>

I hadda LOL, but only after trying this out in Hungarian and Hebrew - and realizing that it would fail to work in either language, for the same reason it doesn't work in French. :D

In Hebrew you're supposed to ask "noach lecha?", lit. "are you having comfort?". Luckily, if you say literally "are you comfortable": "ata noach?", it has a relatively charitable interpretation, of "are you easygoing?", besides being comfortable to sit on. :s

Reminds me of the single greatest linguistic howler I ever committed. I was in Paris, trying to speak French with a mixed anglo-francophone group of friends. Somebody female asked me, with a note of incredulity, why I was *still* living with my girlfriend in Dublin (subtext: "... when you could stay in *paris* with *me* ...")

I tried to laugh it off with a joke. Many couples say they stay together for the children, but that didn't apply. But we had a cat. A female cat. "C'est la chatte", I said.

Suffice to add that if I'd said "for the pussy" in English it would have been about 1% as strong. I shocked a bunch of unshockable sophisticates.

"Not all artists may be chess players, but all chess players are artists." -- Marcel Duchamp

Also thanks for that ART PHOTO you posted in my forum.

- They do not bark and they know the secrets of the deep.

Non, that is lobsters, according to Gerard de Nerval.

It's not in the way that you toad me
It's not in the way you're an amphibian
It's not in the way you've been eating my flies
It's not your metamorphoses
It's not in the way you croak or the warts that are all over you

Toad the line
Spawn isn't always on time

Mr Toad owns a nuclear reactor. Homer's job is to shout "toad in the hole" whenever anything, uh, reacts.

Lisa stars in "Toad und die Madchen".

Darnit, <Dom>... I had time to look in here before going off to work today. Result? I kept bursting out laughing at random intervals and in random situations at work... thanks! Luckily there weren't many people around.

Apologies for laughing, also; this was an excruciatingly embarrassing incident for you, though I suspect the worst part was not the shocking of your companions per se, but more the *unintentional* nature of it. ;)

Tents? Tense? Camp, moi?
Vae, I'm turning into a ♕ ...

Most ambiguous, that ♕ symbol. Could be a guy in a pinstriped bowler hat, a candelabra (cf sacred candle holders in several pre-electric religions), a punk with mohican, or a burning bush. As for post-electric religions, it could be a diagram of Tom Cruise wired to his celebrity e-meter.

Tom: My brain is on fire, man.

LRH: Have you had bad thoughts about El Ron?

Tom: Yes, yes, anything, I confess ...

LRH: Increase the current. Fry the traitor.

I'm curious: when you do that, does the laugh come out differently in different languages? Like, say, a hearty guffaw in Hungarian, a smothered chortle in English, and a godly thunderous enemy-smiting roar in Hebrew, like the one that came out of Josh-wah's trombone ... ?

Well met- I was going to tell you something but I forgot.

Oh yes- there was a <real> American Tax on "Chess Balls."

This was a real law, it was the topic of an editorial in Steinitz's famous chess magazine.

Apparently, the drafters of the law actually thought that Chess had Balls, like in a skittles set or something like that.