Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Communication Bloopers.

Tonight as we ate dinner, we were talking about a visit David, Deborah, and Bro. Tom made to Ayutthaya on Monday afternoon. They had gone to an elephant camp and as they talked about it, I asked, "Is that the nursing home for elephants?"

Um, yeah. Let's all go sing some songs and encourage those dear old elephants.

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Soon the conversation led to Christmas. Krinny was talking about Christmas in Australia when she said, "You see, their winter is in the middle of summer."

Right-0. How does that work again?!?
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On Sunday evening, David, Deborah, and I walked into B2S (an office supply store) looking for balloons. I called Pookie and asked her how to say balloon in Thai. I very distinctly heard her say, "Puktsong" and so I confidently walked up to a sales lady and said, "Sawadeka... puktsong?" She smiled at me and said, "just a moment" before walking over to a computer to check it out. After a consultation with two co-workers, they led us in the direction of the magazine rack and began looking very intently for something. We realized something got lost in translation, so I called Pookie up and had her talk to the sales lady. While the lady was on the phone with Pookie, she began to smile and laugh some before hanging up and leading us in the opposite direction. She did find the balloons for us and we all had a good laugh, even though we didn't know what I had said. So when we met up with Pookie, we asked her what "puktsong" is. Before she told us that, she said the word for balloon is "pukpome" and what I had said to the saleslady was: "Hello... bullet?"

I'm surprised they didn't call security!

9 comments:

Ashley said...

Oh goodness. Glad you can keep a good attitude about it!!

Anonymous said...

Hahaha!!! Remember the time Joh called someone "armpit" instead of "friend"?? ;)

~ Katie

Anonymous said...

Oh Anne, you crack me up! Thanks for the laugh! :)
~Tiffany Hansen

Ashley said...

Just curious ~ is "Bullet" the name of a magazine?

Anne said...

No, bullet is just that: bullet:). Apparently the sales lady was going to look for a magazine that talked about bullets!

tanyaa said...

A misspoken word or phrase, especially one uttered on broadcast media. In baseball, a weakly hit ball or a high, lobbed pitch. Both usages are American in origin.Blooper in the sense of "blunder" arose about 10 years after the word was coined in the mid-1920s. According to Richard Lederer, author of several popular books on language, the baseball term was coined almost simultaneously with to bloop: to operate a radio set "in such a way that it emitted howls and whistles, perhaps an echo of our reactions to physical or verbal howlers." Both coinages were probably onomatopoetic: imitative of the radio howl and of the sound of a poorly hit ball.
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Tanyaa
Internet Marketing

Sarah Joy said...

That's great! We're missionaries going to Mexico, and when we first were learning Spanish, my husband told a sales lady he was going to hit her instead of pay her-the difference between "pegar" and "pagar". She thought it was very funny, and Ryan's lucky he had his language teacher there with him! Then there's the kids who looked really confused when I told them to stop throwing the homework at each other-Homework and dirt sound a lot alike in Spanish!

Tori Leslie said...

Oh wow funny, been there done that!

So glad you got your pukpome after all.

Tiffany said...

:-) That's too funny!