Sunday, 13 November 2011

Language difficulties

Went to a dinner with friends on Friday night where a sequence of language difficulties began. Firstly Mrs-Blog's friend Jane, who is from Yorkshire, said she had seen a mutual friend Paul in cow pat. It only took a second to realise it was the accent and she actually meant to say "Car Park". Nonetheless, I was left with the image of Paul standing in cow poo having a conversation with Jane as if nothing was wrong.


Later, after a few glasses of wine, our host told us of his trip to Japan whilst working for a local textile company. The company was called Ballantynes. It would be difficult to think of a harder word for the Japanese hosts to get their tongues around, "Barrantynes" probably being the norm.

So a link with oriental difficulties and Yorkshire; it reminded me that the first non-UK restaurant in the Harry Ramsden chain was opened in Hong Kong. You would have thought they would have changed the name.

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