False cognates, or "false friends", are those cunning little traps that allow natives to guffaw at ignorant foreigners struggling to communicate in another tongue. Essentially, false cognates are words in one language that resemble words from another language, but differ in meaning, sometimes significantly. These faux dopplegangers, if you will, can lead to potential miscommunication, and in retrospect, provide hilarious entertainment.
Some 35 years ago, as a foreign exchange student in Paraguay without any prior knowledge of Spanish, I was trying to explain my embarrassment over something, and of course, if you just tack a vowel onto the end of a an English word, it must be the Spanish equivalent...I mean, come on, embarazada surely sounds like it would have the same meaning! Little did I know that I was claiming to revolutionize medicine by declaring to be the first pregnant human male. Nothing like exponentially increasing one's embarrassment.
So the other day I was browsing through the Bosnian-English dictionary that I just received in the mail, and lo and behold, my eyes were quick to spot the Bosnian word "svastika". I immediately had visions of throngs of men wearing military uniforms and jackboots, sporting goofy abbreviated mustaches with their right arms raised, singing the Horst Wessel song (a catchy little uber-fascist number popular with the SS).
But no! Svastika is not exactly what comes to the mind of an English speaker when referring to a sister-in-law. Unless of course...oops, we'd better not go there.
So today's lesson is: always look up new words that you encounter, even if they look very similar to English words, just to make sure of their meaning, and to avoid confusing and awkward moments in foreign lands.
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