OT: Unusual email address

Mar 03, 2023 Last reply: 3 years ago 35 Replies

I didn't know that.

My dad had an Irish colleague whose surname was Finucane, pronounce FiNOOken. When they went to an international conference, he noticed that the Dutch people sniggered (very politely and almost imperceptibly). It turned out that a Dutch word for "f*ck" is pronounced rather similarly.

I remember the office block where I used to work had a Tannoy system in the early days, to call people to take an outside call if they were away from their desks. One guy (I think he was German) had the surname Puke - pronounced POOka. The inevitable happened one day: a new woman on the Tannoy was handed a note "Will Mr Puke please phone 1234" without being briefed about the name. And she got a fit of the giggles: "Will Mr, er..., Mr PYOOK? (is that really his name?). Will Mr PYOOK..." [uncontrollable giggling, followed by very noisy mike-drop].

I wonder if the pronunciation "FYOOsha" for Fuchsia is confined to English-speaking countries or whether it is now standard in Germany as well, where it is derived from Fuchs = Fox. I suppose it's undergone a similar reversal of letters as Dachshund (often pronounced Daschund in the UK), though the correct German pronunciation (it means badger-dog) is starting to prevail nowadays.

Plenty of Irish men are named Patrick and often known as Packie. Despite it being the name they are known as, it's not always the best thing to shout to get their attention :)

In message <tu4u1v$1n3rh$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, SteveW snipped-for-privacy@walker-family.me.uk> writes

What bollocks! To be sure. to be sure, I've never heard of any Paddy being called 'Packie'!

When I was building the house on a bare block of land, one of the neighbour's teenagers I used to do some of the ditch digging was quite chauvinist, so I called him True Blue Bill to rev him up a bit. He responded by calling me Woggy, which caught on with the other neighours kids I never chased away.

It wasn't at all unusual to be walking down the main street of my town on a saturday morning, to have one of the kids shout 'hey woggy' as a greeting. This town is about half Italian immigrants and it was hilarious to see heads whip around whenever that happened.

Or get her to call out 'Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?'

at BBC Lime Grove Club the Commisionaire paged "Mr Andrew Pandy"

I had a school chum called Stephen Print. He had an older sister.

I said oh so a Miss Print?

At ICL, the company-wide phone book listed a person's name, job title (often incomprehensible acronyms) and site code (of the form LLLdd, where LLL was the first few letters of the town and dd were digits for the site number within that town where there were multiple sites/building).

And so there appeared an entry, which appeared in several additions in the 1990s:

O McDonald, ADA FM, EIE10

Do kids still call out, "Your Mum [takes it up the bum]"?

Never heard a kid do that. You poms are weird.

My F-I-L was.

So was a well known Irish footballer

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There are plenty more.

In my student days we had a fellow engineering student from Hong Kong, called Benjamin Ng. We always joked that if he got his degree and then worked to be a Chartered Engineer, people would say that they could see his qualifications, but what was his name, as he'd be:

B.Ng BEng CEng

OK - that's two.

I don't believe it!

There was also Packie Manus Byrne, a well-known traditional musician.

My wife confirms that she knows of plenty (being from an Irish background).

Just try a Google search and you'll find loads.

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