Alexanderplatz wrote:
Can I bum a fag off you? is an polite informal way of asking someone for a free cigarette.
Do you mind if I bum a fag? is also commonly heard.
Yup. And that’s even funnier if you’re queer – it’s a slang term especially among gay men for casual hookups / beats / the act of doing that. You’re “going out to bum a fag,” means you’re going hunting for a one night stand, usually involving grindr or scruff, to bang some dude you’ll never see again and never knew his name to begin with. If you said that in some very gay male circles, he’d think you were propositioning him!
And-
ASPartOfMe wrote:
“Fag” or “fa***t” is roughly the homophobe equivalent to “n****r” in America.
Not necessarily. A lot of LGBT people “reclaim” that one. I know I use it for my everywhere sense of sexuality sometimes, and also a lot of gay men often refer to themselves as “fags,” “poofters,” etc. It’s kind of an in-your-face attitude – “you want to sling off at me for being a fag? You think that’s insulting? It’s not! I’m proud to be a
fag!”
A lot of “bad” words like that have been re-interpreted to a degree, as noted, language changes. For example I use “tranny,” I’ll refer to
myself as a tranny. Some people smile, but others look at me like I’ve just spat on them. Pick your crowd I guess.
Raleigh wrote:
Also, can't be stuffed = can't be bothered.
Yah, and it can also mean too tired - “You coming out tonight?”
“Nah man I’m stuffed.”
OutsideView wrote:
They were't too bad with my Manchester accent when I was staying in California but the girl I was working with was from Newcastle and they had no idea what she was talking about! I kept having to be her translator
The most bizarre thing happened to me I think in San Francisco, where some woman actually told me my accent was “sexy.”
Michael829 wrote:
In a related topic, it's funny about accents. None of us think we have one
I know I do, whichever country I’m in. Speech issues give me this weird, nowhereland accent and everyone thinks I’m from somewhere else.
As to spellings, I like the American versions of many things just for phonetics – if you actually said “realise,” as in the British spelling, you’d be pronouncing it “real – ice.”
No one says that. It’s a z sound – hence the American spelling “realize” is more phonetically correct .
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Alexithymia - 147 points.
Low-Verbal.