‘Is there a holy mess here?’ a Slovak student asked a priest outside a church in London. ‘A holy mess?’ the priest repeated in amazement. What the student had in mind was a mass (a ceremony held in memory of Christ), not a mess (an untidy state). The Slovaks often pronounce [e] instead of [æ] and unintentionally change the meaning of a word. Sometimes we say pen instead of pan, flesh instead of flash, bet instead of bat, etc. Besides, the adjective holy doesn’t normally collocate with Mass (which is usually spelt with a capital M). People say, for example, ‘I go to Mass on Sunday mornings.’ Another way to say that is, ‘I attend Sunday morning service,’ or simply ‘I go to church on Sunday mornings.’
It’s interesting what a lot of students own the part of a port where goods are put onto or taken off ships, since many of them claim they have a dock. They want to say they have a dog, of course, but they incorrectly assimilate [g] to [k], as they are used to doing in Slovak. Similarly, they often make a pot from a pod, a rope from a robe, a dose from a doze, etc. If you want to speak correct English, remember not to assimilate a voiced consonant to an unvoiced one at the end of a word.
A special category of words that can easily confuse Slovak users of English is false friends – English words that look similar to ours but have different meanings. Let me give you some examples.
A novel is a lengthy piece of fiction (román), not a shorter one, which is called a novella or a novelette in English (novela).
A billion is a number written with nine noughts, i.e. one thousand million (miliarda), not a number written with twelve noughts, i.e. one million million (bilión), which is a trillion in English.
If you need to buy an exercise book in Britain, you could hardly get it in a paper shop, which is a newsagent’s, in fact, i.e. a small shop selling mainly newspapers and magazines (novinový stánok). A shop similar to our papiernictvo, i.e. one selling paper, pens, etc., is called a stationer’s.
A host is a person who has invited somebody to a meal, a party, or a weekend stay at their house (hostiteľ), whereas the one who has been invited is a guest (hosť).
In the previous issues you could read about some words having different meanings in British English and American English. Here are two more examples.
When a Londoner says, ‘I used the subway,’ he walked through a passageway going under a road (also called an underpass). When a New Yorker says the same sentence, he means New York’s underground railway system, which is called the Underground or the Tube in London and the Metro in Washington D.C.
If an American visiting Britain wants to buy a pair of trousers and asks for pants as he is used to doing in the USA, he could easily experience a pretty embarrassing situation. The British use the informal expression pants for naming underpants or knickers, which are articles of clothing worn under trousers.
Students sometimes say or write, ‘There is a football playground in our village.’ A playground, however, is an area with a sandpit, swings, see-saws, climbing frames, etc. for little children to play. The place where football matches are played is called a football pitch, a football field or a football ground.
I’d like to remind you that in American English, football is American football (a sport similar to rugby), which is different from European football (also called soccer). When we read the sentence, ‘He plays for an American football team,’ without knowing the context, we can’t be sure whether he plays for a football team from the USA, as opposed to one from another country (either an American football one or a soccer one), or for an American football team, as opposed to a soccer team (which might be from, let’s say, Canada). So there are at least three possibilities for an unambiguous sentence: ‘He plays for an American American football team.’ ‘He plays for an American soccer team.’ ‘He plays for a Canadian American football team.’
By the way, speaking of Canada, you would hardly do well with the word-for-word translation of ‘Canadian joke’ for a trick played on somebody to make them look silly and make other people laugh. You’d better use the correct English collocation ‘practical joke’. :-)
