Faux Pas

Ling, a Chinese student in my lab, asked me:

"What's pussy?"

I looked at her and said:

"Errr...little cat."

"No. It doesn't make sense. Some other meaning?"

"Why not look it up yourself?"

"I looked," she held up her tiny pocket English-Chinese dictionary,"it says 'little cat',too. But it doesn't make much sense."

"It also means this," I took out my pocket pc, found its "proper" meaning in the digital dictionary, and showed it to her.

She read it, blushed and said,

"I knew it means something bad."

"Don't worry," I comforted her, "it happens to many people."

So I told her the stories of Mei, another Chinese girl who did rotation in my lab a few years ago. Once she asked my boss a question when he walked out of his office for a cup of coffee:

"What's dick?"

"Errr...it's the nick name for Richard."

"No. The place I read it, it probably means some thing."

"Oh, boy, what were you reading? Err...let's just say it's some organ men have but women don't."

With that, my boss turned around and went back to his office, without coffee.

She realized what she had just asked, blushed and said:

"My God, I did it again! Oh!"

Then Mei told me another story of her:

She did her first rotation in Hall's lab when she first came here from China. She wanted to give him a good impression so she often worked late till 11 pm. Another graduate student in the lab, Tom, was also a hard-working guy so they often worked together in the night and developed good friendship.

One night, around nine o'clock, all of a sudden, she asked Tom,

"Tom, do you happen to have a rubber?"

He stared at her, wide-eyed, for a full minute before he said:

"What???"

She thought he didn't understand her because of her Chinese accent, so she repeated:

"Do you have a RUBBER?"

He was still staring so she add:

"You know, I was writing this stuff and I found some mistakes so I want to correct them..." and she pointed to the piece of paper she was writing on.

He immediately relaxed and said:

"Sure. Here you are. By the way, it's called ERASER."

"You sure scared poor old Tom!"I laughed out loud.

She cried out innocently:"How would I know rubber means condom in the States? We learned the word rubber in the middle school English textbook! Don't you remember? -'What is this?' -'This is a ruler.' -'What is that?' -'That is a rubber!'How can they change this to such a bad meaning?!"

The takehome lesson: stop reading textbooks and start watching porn.