I hate to admit it, but I used to watch the Roseanne show rather regularly. Roseanne and the character of her sister, Jackie, hated their mother. They used to sign off from phone conversations by saying, very quickly "F*** you very much!" If the older woman ever questioned them, they'd claim the connection was faulty or something.

Do you all know of other sort of sneaky sayings like this? Subtle ways of taking control w/o letting the other person even know.

When I was teaching English to a group of Arabic-speaking visitors I learned that their playful "bye-bye" phrase only sounded like "Take it easy."

"Tell-hass-TEE-zee" has quite a different meaning in Arabic.

((( Kiss my ___ )))

There's the age-old pretending to cough while actually saying the word "Tosser". If you've not heard it, it's dificult to describe, but quite easy to do if you just let the first syllable form the explosive part of the (short) cough (think of the cough at the beginning of Metallica's 'Bad Seed' to get the kind of length), and sort of swallow the second, unstressed schwa-ed syllable.

I'm sure there are more, but I can't think of them at the moment. I'll come back if I do.

Jerry, that was wonderful!

I have heard of people talking to each other in a foreign language...speaking disparagingly of those around them, especially if 'those around' happen to be American! In one case, the people didn't realize that, in fact, the American spoke their language and understood everything being said.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cat:
There's the age-old pretending to cough while actually saying the word "Tosser". If you've not heard it, it's dificult to describe, but quite easy to do if you just let the first syllable form the explosive part of the (short) cough (think of the cough at the beginning of Metallica's 'Bad Seed' to get the kind of length), and sort of swallow the second, unstressed schwa-ed syllable.

I'm sure there are more, but I can't think of them at the moment. I'll come back if I do.

---

There's a useful variant on this where you just cough and then shout tosser without making any attempt to cover up the latter utterance with the former. It is very useful to anyone who lives or works in university towns such as Cambridge or Durham.

Oh yes! The coughing disguise! I'd forgotten about that . . . except here we dont' say tosser (in fact, I had to look it up to be sure I knew the implication). We would cough and say "bullshit".