At Home with the Roommates

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I live with two roommates that are also English teachers. My female roommate is from Georgia and my male roommate is from Britian. Although the three of us came down here to teach, we are also attempting to learn a little bit of Spanish. To be honest, we are failing miserably. First of all, Cuenca is a town full of English speakers. Second of all, we have been focusing more on just trying to understand each other. Our British roommate is from Liverpool and you cannot understand a word that he says and most of the expressions that he uses are simply hilarious. As for my roommate from Georgia, she does not have a strong southern accent, but she also has her own expressions and she tends to make up words.
As a result to all of our miscommunications we have decided to make a list. We have split the list up into British English and American English. On the British English side we have included things like “scrub a dead dog”, “whinger”, and “bad-ass”. On the American English side we have included “band-aid”, “I’ll be damned”, and “bad ass”. The reason we have included bad-ass on both lists is because they mean very different things depending on what form of English you are speaking. My roommate from Georgia called herself a bad-ass one night after winning a game and my other roommate looked at her with pure shock on his face. In British English, to have a bad-ass means that you have diarrhea. It took us a while to stop laughing about this one.
The funniest “lost in translation” moment happened when the three of us were at the school about to teach our classes. I don’t know how this came up, but we got on the conversation of whipped cream. Our British roommate then told us that he had a friend from southern Britain that called it squirty cream. Well, my other roommate and I could not stop laughing after he said it. The funniest part being that he didn’t understand why we were laughing. He kept on asking us why it was so funny, but we had to tell him that it was not an appropriate conversation for school. Later on while watching a futbol match at a pizzeria, we decided to tell him what came to most American’s minds if someone called a white liquid substance squirty cream.

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