Post in 50s+ Travellers

Don't worry, Annarita: the same thing happened to me and I had to do some research to understand it.

David Sedaris is an American humorist, essayist, and author widely known for his sharp observational comedy and essays detailing cultural and linguistic misunderstandings.

In the post, Darrell is sharing a classic Sedaris-style observation: the incredibly funny, almost creative ways that confident tourists mispronounce unfamiliar words by reading them purely through the lens of American English phonetics. Darrell highlights three specific examples of butchered words that are so funny they have become permanent inside jokes:

• "Lu-pree-shun": An American tourist in an Irish pub trying to ask for a "leprechaun" (the mythical Irish creature, which is actually pronounced "LEP-reh-kahn").

• "Fudge-ords": A tourist in Oslo, Norway, trying to say "fjords" (the deep, glacial coastal inlets, correctly pronounced "fee-YORDS"). The tourist read it as if it contained the English word "fudge."

• "Tor-tuaze": The English word "tortoise" (the land-dwelling turtle, normally pronounced "TOR-tuss"). Because the word ends in the letters "-oise," a couple decided to pronounce it with a heavy, exaggerated faux-French accent (making it rhyme with French words like "framboise" or "bourgeois").

Darrell is essentially laughing at how these highly confident mispronunciations often stick in your head, to the point where it becomes more fun to say the wrong version than the correct one.

@GASPERDUPUY I would have liked to get the explaination from the OP😅😂🤣

He did a better job than I could. Do you see the humor Annarita? It's not a side-splitter; more of a chuckle. I particularly like the one about the tortwasie/tortwa.

I felt really stupid for not understanding Darrell's post, and when I read your confession that you didn't understand it either (and Darrell wasn't replying: in fact, it took him almost a week to reply), I decided to do the search myself.

Am I too anxious?