Misunderstandings

A woman from Australia was on vacation in California. On her first evening in California, she went to a restaurant for dinner.

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll have the grilled salmon.”

“Good choice,” the waiter said. “The salmon came in fresh today. Your dinner comes with soup or salad.”

“Sounds good,” the woman said.

“The soup or salad?” the waiter asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“You can only have one,” the waiter said.

“That’s fine,” she said, sounding a little confused. “I only want one. It’s big, right?”

“Which one?” the waiter asked.

“The salad,” she replied.

“No, it’s not really big,” the waiter said. “If you want a big salad, there’s a dinner salad on the menu. You can have grilled salmon on top of that.”

“I’d rather have the salmon dinner,” the woman said.

The waiter sighed. “OK,” he said. “I’ll bring you the salmon dinner. With salad.”

“The super one, right?” the woman asked.

The waiter began to laugh, and a minute later the Australian woman was laughing, too. Now they both understood what was causing the confusion: The dinner came with either soup or salad—not a “super salad.”

Similar-sounding English words also caused trouble for a man who wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Oakland, California—but this misunderstanding had more serious consequences. The man’s problems began at the airport in Los Angeles. He thought he heard his flight announced, so he walked to the gate, showed his ticket, and got on the plane. Twenty minutes after takeoff, the man began to worry. Oakland was north of Los Angeles, but the plane seemed to be heading west, and when he looked out his window all he could see was ocean. “Is this plane going to Oakland?” he asked the flight attendant. The flight attendant gasped. “No,” she said. “We’re going to Auckland—Auckland, New Zealand.”

Because so many English words sound similar, misunderstandings among English-speaking people are not uncommon. Every day, people speaking English ask one another questions like these: “Did you say seventy or seventeen?” “Did you say that you can come or that you can’t?” Similar-sounding words can be especially confusing for people whose native language is not English.

When a Korean woman who lives in the United States arrived at work one morning, her boss asked her, “Did you get a plate?” “No…,” she answered, wondering what in the world he meant. She worked in an office. Why did the boss ask her about a plate? All day she wondered about her boss’s strange question, but she was too embarrassed to ask him about it. At five o’clock, when she was getting ready to go home, her boss said, “Please be on time tomorrow. You were 15 minutes late this morning.” “Sorry,” she said. “My car wouldn’t start, and…” Suddenly she stopped talking and began to smile. Now she understood. Her boss hadn’t asked her, “Did you get a plate?” He had asked her, “Did you get up late?”

English is not the only language with similar-sounding words. Other languages, too, have words that can cause misunderstandings, especially for foreigners.

An English-speaking woman who was traveling in Mexico saw a sign in front of a restaurant. The sign said that the special that day was “sopa con jamón y cebollas.” She knew that was Spanish for “soup with ham and onions.” That sounded good. As the woman walked to her table, she practiced ordering. She whispered to herself, “Sopa con jamón y cebollas. Sopa con jamón y cebollas.” Then she sat down, and a waiter came to take her order. “Sopa con jabón y caballos,” she said. “What?” the waiter asked. No wonder the waiter didn’t understand. The woman had just ordered a very unusual lunch: soup with soap and horses.

“Soup or salad” and “super salad.” Auckland and Oakland. “A plate” and “up late.” Jamón and jabón. When similar-sounding words cause a misunderstanding, probably the best thing to do is just laugh and learn from the mistake. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to laugh. The man who traveled to Auckland instead of Oakland didn’t feel like laughing. But even that misunderstanding turned out all right in the end. The airline paid for the man’s hotel room and meals in New Zealand and for his flight back to California. “Oh well,” the man later said, “I always wanted to see New Zealand.”