And if you thought that was bad...

Not to be outdone by my blunder of asking for tepid orange juice with ice, the very same friend who taught me the difference between natural and da fruta has made a blunder far worse, and much funnier, than mine. As part of a project that he is working on, my friend and his work team were going to go to Canada and take an intensive English course. As he is the one who currently has the most capacity in English, he was elected to write an email to their Canadian contacts letting them know how excited the Recifense team was to have the opportunity to increase their language skills. Knowing that the word excited in Portuguese has several meanings, one of which is clearly inappropriate for a work-related email – kind of like in English – he decided that rather than risk embarrassment, he would look up excited in the dictionary and use an alternate translation, just to be sure. The result? We would like to say that we are very aroused by our upcoming trip to Canada....

Needless to say, we get quite a bit of mileage out of this one! On the positive side, it seems as though the English course was a success – the participants now know all the variations of excite and its synonyms!

Chant'l: Your coffee story was great! I guess one learns to just nod and agree!