Rayguns, Sodomy, and The Clash

Words mean different things in different places

wankercat:

One of best things about the Internet, in my opinion, is that I get to talk to people who aren’t like me. I get to chat to people from South Africa or Croatia or USA or Ireland almost every day, as well as people from different classes, different races, and entirely different lives from myself. And that is the greatest fucking thing ever to me, that I can chat about Harry Potter or my favourite bands with people that are completely different from me.

And one of the things you learn is that different words, phrases and slang mean different things.

For example, years ago in a chat, I don’t remember where, I was talking about this group of annoying kids that hangs outside the store I work at every day, and I referred to them as ‘beaners’ which is slang, I’ll admit it’s really uncommon and I actually haven’t heard it in years, for what’s now called hipsters, you know the people that wear skinny jeans and have the sides of their heads shaved, I think ‘beaner’ came from the phrase ‘skinny as a string bean’ because they were usually very skinny. Anyway, I was the only non-USA people in the chat room, and I heard later that one of the girls was really angry at me, because she was Mexican-American, and in the USA, ‘beaner’ is a racial slur for Mexicans. Now, it’s no one fault, it’s not my fault because I live in Australia, there’s not many Mexicans or South Americans here, to me ‘beaner’ was another word for ‘hipster’, and at the same time I don’t blame the girl for being angry at what she perceived as racism.

Another example was that I was chatting with a girl on Neopets when I was a kid, and I mentioned I had Cheerios with tomato sauce for breakfast. And she expressed how disgusting that was. And I was talking about Cheerios, the lil red sausages (they used to give a free Cheerio to kids at my local supermarket until Health and Saftey made them stop because H&S like to suck the fun outta everything):

And it wasn’t until years later, after I stopped going on Neopets, that I found a cereal called Cheerios at a USA specialty store, and realised she must have thought I was eating cereal with tomato sauce.

This happened to me when I was visiting some friends in England. They told me that they had made cookies with Smarties in them, and I said that was pretty vile. They were taken aback until we hashed out what Smarties were in our mutual countries. 

In the US, Smarties are a chewy fruit candy that would be disgusting in any baked good. 

In the UK, Smarties are like M&Ms and definitely delicious in cookie form. 

Jumping the gun: 1, Me: 0.