Learning any new language comes with easy missteps that can lead to miscommunicating (at best), embarassing (somewhere in the middle) or offending (at worst). I've become reasonable good at avoiding these situations, but every now and again a little slip of the tongue happens.
A few weeks ago my roommate Domenico and I went to a small town in the Castelli Romani and bought a bunch of new, homemade wine (think beaujolais nouveau - called novello in Italy) and we have been discussing going back to get more to bottle and store for a few months or a year. In one of our recent discussions we were talking about the dangers of storing homemade wine. One of the biggest problems is that it is made without any preservatives, so if not stored properly it can quickly spoil. I made this point, in Italian, and it didn't come off exactly as I wanted. The word for preservatives in Italian is conservanti not preservativi, a difference I knew, but tripped over when speaking quickly. So instead of saying the wine didn't have any preservatives in it, I said it didn't have any condoms in it. Yup, wine without condoms. Oops...
1 comment:
Not as bad as when I was trying to get my tickets to the Uffizi and instead of saying "reservation" I ended up saying "penetration". The security guard was busting up and of course I had no idea what I had just said and asked him to explain what I had done wrong. He managed to catch his breath and tell me... I managed to turn extremely red in the face!
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