Vomiting after ingestion, and how to do so?

In 1967, as a poor student trying to vacation in Paris on $5/day, of course I was doing my laundry in the sink. I had never practiced this at home and soon found out the difficulties of trying to use the tea wafer sized bar of soap provided by the 1/2 star "hotel" I was staying at. On the corner was a typical European neighborhood grocery store, 8' wide, and literally stacked to the ceiling with dark shelves containing everything from dried cereal to toilet cleaner. I was looking for a small bottle of Woolite but saw nothing that might substitute. Not knowing French, I asked the battle-axe behind the counter, "do you have any Woolite?" My answer was a disgusted look look of scorn at the savage across the counter who didn't know French, and didn't know that it was mandatory to begin all conversations with a cheery "Bon Jour!". Suddenly, behind her, I spotted a small bottle of Woolite and pointed to it, saying "Woolite, Woolite!" She continued to grimace at me, seeming intent not to try to understand. Of course, the remedy in those situations is just to repeat yourself louder and point more dramatically. "WOOLITE, OVER THERE!". She finally turned around, saw what I was pointing to, and exclaimed, "Ah, Whooooleeete" [phonetic spelling to imitate her correct, French accent]. She picked up the bottle, slammed it onto the counter, and then I'm sure charged me at least double the normal price for her bother. Those were the days!

Hey, it was a shop teacher, not a science teacher. Different union.

So the Germans are as bad as the French, who call a lemon "un citron", i.e. any citrus fruit.

A potato is a ground apple.

Mine are, they are twisted together so they have to be.

The wires down the street arent insulated and mine has the 11KV wires on the top of the pole in a 3 wire triangle configuration, with the 240/415 wires lower down in a 4 wire horizontal config.

Some years ago, we wanted some bread (won't say where we were yet). I stayed outside the shop, and SWMBO went in. Through the window I witnessed all the miscommunication. She had several goes before she got the right word for the kind of load she wanted. Paying then became another entertainment. In the end, she held out a handful of coins and the shop assistant took what they needed.

Where were we?

Gateshead.

My dad had a colleague at work who came from somewhere in the North East, though I didn't know that at the time. She came to our house one day (I was in my early teens) and after she'd been talking for a while I was intrigued by her accent. Luckily I waited till after she'd gone before I said to dad "She's foreign, isn't she - but which country does she come from?"

She wanted my money for the bread. And it wasn't Paris, it was the Alps.

That was the second event in France for me. I asked for one pancake. Un crepe. Apparently it's une crepe. Like a pancake can have a gender. The seller actually looked very confused, then raised his eyebrows and held up one finger and said "une?"

That would have made them ask, "Wünschst du dir einen schlag job?"

A strong accent is indicative of a low intelligence.

Carpenters aren't that bright.

Where I lived as kid, our house had underground wires, but next door was a very old house which had electricity added later, above ground. It was a single insulated wire, same as goes underground, one of those armour plated things. As a teenager I did his gardening, and I once pointed out the bracket to the eaves had come loose. He said he didn't care, that was the electricity board's problem. 6 months later, short circuit in the attic, no fuse as the electricity board are thick as f*ck, roof caught fire in the middle of the night. Fire brigade had no access to turn off the power and had no idea how to put out a live electrical fire. The whole roof burnt down.

I vaguely remember saying the birds weren't grounded and vaguely remember his marking me wrong on the only electric test, but I got an A in the course so I didn't argue with him.

Not just carpenters.

When I was about 8, my mother would listen to the radio while I had breakfast before school, and they had a "Bible scholar" on for 5 or 10 minutes, And he was discussing a line from Psalms, "And the right hand of the Lord doeth valiently." Why did it say "the right hand", he asked. Because Hebrew was a "primitive language" and it didn't have words for non-tangible things like strength. And I thought this was strange because I was only 8 years old and in the 3rd grade and I already knew two words for strength. But he was on the radio, so he must know what he's talking about, I felt.

It took me quite a while to realize he didn't know what he was talking about, and he didn't recognize poetry when he saw it. Even though he called himself a Bible scholar.

PS, there are 20 or more words for strength of one sort or another, and there are words for all the other intangibles too.

Of course. Haven't you seen a boy crepe meet a girl crepe?

I've always wondered why many languages (Latin, Greek, French, German are the ones I know about) have the concept of gender for inanimate objects (as opposed to for male/female people/animals). English chose to dispense with gender (if it ever had it), and it's one less thing to learn.

Where I used to work, we had quite a few French people who were on work exchange schemes. I asked one of them whether French people sometimes made mistakes with gender, and how other people regarded mistakes like that. He said it sounded slightly uneducated, but it was regarded as a very minor mistake, like dropping an H in English. Apart from a very small number of words which were identical (or sounded identical) but one was male and one was female (*), it didn't affect intelligibility at all.

He said the thing which really *did* sound "theek as peegsheet" (his phrase) was Belgians and Swiss who used their own words for "seventy", "eighty" and "ninety" - septante, huitante, nonante instead of the cack-handed French soixante-dix, quatre-vignts, quatre-vignts-dix. French people apparently regard septante, huitante, nonante as "baby words".

(*) For example:

Le mer = sea La mère = mother

What you mean he doesn't ramble naked over hills in -5°C weather? Or drive with a .05 second gap between him and the car in front ? or... ?

Some boy crepes grow up to be crepey old men.

Looks like its just another example of that other quirk of language like say that ships are female and not male etc for no good reason at all.

And obvious spelling errors like draw instead of drawer when referring to drawers in a chest of drawers etc.

Not intelligibility, but can remove ambiguity, rarely.

But that is really just bigotry.

I read the label.

What newsgroup would serve me better?