Is That Even in English?

Anyone who has learned a second language knows how easy it is to make mistakes which no native speaker would ever make.

I live in South America and struggle away in Spanish, with speaking to my 7 month old daughter and writing the only times when I use English these days. As a bit of fun I decided to put this site to a test and ask a few Spanish speakers to look at some of the items on it and tell me what they think they are. None of them speak perfect English but they all know a reasonable amount of words. Here are the results.

Walking canes. This one is a bit tricky, as it doesn’t translate at all. The most common answer was that it must be something to do with sugar cane, although where the walking bit comes in no one wants to hazard a guess at. Finally, under some intense interrogation and after a couple of glasses of wine, someone admitted that since gringos are weird it could be anything really and that they couldn’t rule out a semi religious explanation.

Funny cardboard faces. This one looks on paper a bit easier, as the individual words all translate fairly easily. What no one could grasp – even with the help of the wine – was what on Earth these faces could be. With the bottle of wine nearly finished we made a few of these items ourselves, with varying  degrees of success it has to be said.

Hoover wind tunnel. This one looks easy, doesn’t it? Well, not if you have never head of the Hoover brand it isn’t. This leaves us with a “something wind tunnel”, so everyone assumed that it was a machine for blowing things about, which is a lot cooler than a vacuum cleaner if less practical for cleaning the house. Time to nip out for some more wine I think.

Wedge flip flops. There was no wine left in the shop (and they say that this is the home to the highest vineyards in the world?) so we moved on to the hard stuff, and the same with the questions. With tongues now loosened I got a barrage of possibilities here, from a type of small domesticated animal to a machine for making toasted sandwiches.