Your say - Lost for words 3l126w
Eat your words 5o2932
In the early 1980s I was a soldier stationed in Hamelin, the Pied Piper town. One time my German girlfriend was attempting to explain to me in English, that her flat needed tidying-up as it looked like a pig-sty. Or at least that's what she meant. The nearest she could get to 'pig-sty' was 'pork-stable' (literal translation of Schweinestall)! She had her revenge a few weeks later when we, along with a group of colleagues, wives and girlfriends, were in a restaurant and about to order. I was attempting to request that my meal included a green salad, but I could not the German word for 'lettuce'. I asked my girlfriend for help. She, mis-hearing my question, thought I had asked what the German word for 'letters' was and duly told me: Buchstaben. I then, much to the bafflement of the waitress, carefully asked for ein Buchstabensalat, a letters salad!
Sent by: Geoff
Comments 682840
Nice one! The term "Buchstabensalat" actually exists in German, meaning something like "scrambled words".
"Buchstabensalat" actually refers to the messed up text one sees when they view a website written in another language or encoding, where the characters come through as lines of cryptic symbols.
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