Thread

Linguistic humor, Foreign hotel signs

14 points · 7 comments · sublinear

Loading the complete thread in the background. This saved snapshot is available now. Refresh

TFNA · 1790398966 · focus · HN ↗
Note that in spite of being hosted at a university URL, this is not reliable as fact: these are unsourced and are well known apocryphal texts that have floated around forever and been attributed to various other countries.
In any event, it is striking that examples of comical English are becoming rarer and rarer as machine translation has improved, and younger hotel staff in so many countries today grew up on the internet and are often proficient English speakers.
1. PalmPilotProMax · 1790399522 · focus · HN ↗
  On the language proficiency tangent: I wonder if there are collections of unintentionally funny $LINGUA_FRANCA back in the days of French, Classical Latin, Ancient Chinese, and Ancient Arabic.
2. pulvinar · 1790400475 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah these "signs" are almost 100 years old now: "This text first appeared in an engineering journal in about 1919"[0]. Ngram Viewer and newspapers.com confirm that.
  [0] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish/comments/vhler2/motorcycle_safety_rules_from_honda_1962" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/engrish/comments/vhler2/motorcycle_...
card_zero · 1790402078 · focus · HN ↗
"Please to Bathe inside the tub" is a culture clash thing. The tradition is/was to do the soapy part of washing while seated on a stool in a bathroom with a drain, and to use the tub only for the second rinse cycle of the human washing process.
1. mejutoco · 1790419102 · focus · HN ↗
  Where was this? Other than Japan, that is.
comrade1234 · 1790402858 · focus · HN ↗
When I moved to Switzerland I was given a bunch of funny stories about integration. Most were relevant (e.g. if you're American don't invite your subordinates to a weekend bbq) but one story that wasn't relevant but particularly funny was a British man who met his old father returning from a first vacation in France. He asked his father how it went and the father said it was horrible. Everytime he asked someone 'where is the train station' the French people would practically fall on the ground laughing. The French word for train station is la gare, while the word for war is la guerre, and so when an old British man would run up to them and shout where is the war, well...
hibbelig · 1790406368 · focus · HN ↗
I want a car that can trumpet melodiously.
tancop · 1790408161 · focus · HN ↗
> IN A PARIS HOTEL ELEVATOR: Please leave your values at the front desk.
This is just your average corporate job

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.