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I've been letting my place in Germany for 16 years through all kinds of distribution channels. Until 2017 all my guests were German. In January 2018 I decided to start listing with airbnb and I thought, I might now get international guest, time to polish up my English.
At the time my english was kind of ok on a smalltalk-level, what I was completely lacking was the vocabulary around hosting, bedding, cleaning and the like. In order to improve my english in this specialised field, I decided to start reading in the english community center. Because refering words would pop up in this forum for sure and they did.
Whenever I found a word that I didn't know I looked it up in some online dictionary. Next thing I did I created a spreadsheet with all these new words, an airbnb glossary. This is how it looks:
Sometimes though an online dictionary is not sufficant to find out the meaning of a word or an expression. A while ago some Robin in Australia opened a thread entitled:
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Stirring the pot
I couldn't find out what that means. So I sent Robin a privat message and asked him flat out: Robin, what means stirring the pot? Here's his answer:
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I will answer one expression with another....Stirring the pot is linked with Playing the devils advocate!! When you 'stir the pot', you keep the contents on the move, you stop them from boiling over but you keep some action going on in the pot! To bring that into context here Uté it means you keep the thought alive and in others minds by reactivating a worthwhile discussion. You keep on bringing up the same conversation.
Ok – thank You, I've got it. But Robin didn't stop explaining. He continuoued:
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And by playing 'Devils Advocate' you deliberately bring alternative ideas to the conversation. You will state an opinion you don't agree with for the sake of promoting conversation on a subject! Mark Rutte the Dutch Prime Minister may say that no more funds should be made available for EEU bailouts and Angela Merkel may disagree with him and say Germany and France have a duty to support the European community! Although you Ute, agree with Angela Merkel you deliberately take the side of Mark Rutte in order to bring new ideas up that may make both sides agree.
This was not the end of his explanation. Then he talked about the expressiveness of the english language, that it's like a river flowing to the sea, about channels and ditches, empty streams,
tributaries, directions and the ocean.
You must know one thing: Whenever You drop @Robin4 two lines, he comes back with 37 lines. Robin loves to write, he's a great writer an many people in the CC love him for that.
By the way: I learned another word from Robin:
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Jibber Jabber
Have You ever seen that before? I found the word in one of Robins posts:
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But company 'jibber jabber' like that don't instill me with confidence.
I forgot which company he was talking about, but it doesn' matter in this context anyway.
I continued to read in the english CC and while cruising through the lines, again and again I came across the word „bleep“, and it was always accompanied with 2 asterix' in front and in the back:
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**bleep**.
It's easy of course to find out what bleep means, that's the sound a bird makes when it tweets. But **bleep** came up in so many places and in so many contexts and none of them was bird-relatet. I just couldn't figure out what the meanig of it was.
And then this happened: In 2015 I hosted a group of 4 young religious women. While checking them in they told me that they will not check in, because they didn't like my place. I was furious. This was the first time in one and a half decades that someone refused to check in. In 2018 I told this story in the Comminity Center. I wrote:
When I looked how it came out in the community center, I saw this:
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For the first time in 15 years, 4 young religious womed from **bleep**,
all wearing a **bleep**, refused to check into my place bc they didn't like it.
Aaaahaaaaa, now I understood. Airbnb has a discriminating word detector in place and whenever such a word pops up, it get's erased and replaced by **bleep**. All of a sudden everything made sense. Ever since this incident, whenever I talk about people from that area, I refer to them as „People from an area that starts with „a“ and ends with „rab“. The airbnb detector never cought me on that.
My best source of new vocbulary is the lovely @Susan17 in Dublin. While an average english native speaker has a vocabulary of 20.000 word, I think she has 60.000 words to choose from and she does. Here's a list of words I found in her recent threads:
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incendiary, knick-knack, skedaddling, flashing shamrock deely-boppers, Begorrah, malice or sleight, misogynistic, funnelling, beano, feisty side, Geezer, pesky, besmirch, abdicate, villain, astroturfing,
I had to look all these words up. Meanwhile I have restrikted myself to not reading more than 2 Susanposts per day, because it's so much work for me. Same as with Robin in Australia, sometimes I cannot find out the meaning of the words she uses through a dictionary, so I have to ask her. Recently she used the word:
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jack sh*t
Did You see how clever she is? She's putting an asterix into the second word to fool the airbnb bad word detector. So I had to asked her and here's her answer:
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Well, "jack sh*t" is a slang term that originated from the poker world, and refers to drawing an opening hand of Jack, two, unsuited (of different suits - hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades) - and it's considered to be the worst possible hand you could start with.
- Did you have a good hand?"
- "No, I had jack sh*t"
In terms of everyday use, there's not a whole lot of difference in the terms "sh*t" and "jack sh*t", and both are interchangeable.
So far we've been talking abount reading in the Community Center. Now what about writing?
If You are from South America, Asia, Greenland or whereever You may come from, don't be shy to write in this community center of ours. I have never seen anybody making a remark about someone elses english being poor. This really never happened. If You don't get something, look it up and if that is not enough, ask the Person who wrote it.
You may end up with a new CC-friend in Ireland or in Australia.
Schöne Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr.
@Stephanie @Susan17 @Branka-and-Silvia0 @J-Renato0
I am leaving Ute out of this post because she is not well and needs all the uninterrupted rest she can get!
I have another expression which I do use from time to time when Ade queries what I have done with my time!
We have eldest daughter Sarah coming over here for Christmas and I wanted to get the place looking good for her. The cottage 'glory vine' was getting totally out of hand so, first thing this morning I got to it with the pruners and gave it a radical hair cut! I should have taken a before pic but this was after I was done with it and had it looked like it was manageable!
Ade got up and in an almost accusorial way said..."What have you been doing with your morning"?
To which I replied.....
"I have been up since 'Sparrow fart' trying to clean up the garden!"....Sparrow fart meaning, the crack of dawn. Presumably that's what Sparrows do when daylight arrives, they drop a fart!
Is this saying used anywhere else?
Cheers.......Rob
