Even a major news network can't always translate German to English correctly. In this story Reuters "accidentally" translates "Schwanz" into penis instead of tail. ... even worse that they are talking about a popular kids attraction -a giant Lego giraffe!

http://www.regrettheerror.com/wire-s...-giraffe-penis

Makes me feel better about my German word mishaps

In before the poll !

I love that one. As Americans would put it (some of them anyway), abso-fu..ing-lutely great! (I hope this doesn't get intercepted by the forum's bad word filter.)

Well just to be pedantic for a moment, "schwanz" does indeed mean penis in slang German. The Reuters' translation might have been done by someone having a laugh or using the wrong sort of dictionary :-)

It's quite easy to make this sort of mistake, I used to wish my wife good night by saying "schlaff gut" when I meant "Schlaf gut" -schlaff means to get flabby.

And you might want to be careful with that Caffe Latte

haha, Americans don't say that...

haha.

We don't?

Some of the places I lived, they do.

The news industry is in decline. As part of their strategy to reclaim their audience taken away by blogs and Twitter, international news agencies such as Reuters have no other choice but to spice up reports by mentioning intimate body parts. It is a conscious mistake.

I'm an american too :P

& I have never heard anyone say that.

Hmmm.... 9,161,923 square kilometres, 307,308,000 people.... I'm sure some of them somewhere in that vast nation of English speakers probably use that expression at some time or other...

Anyway, back to schwanzlis: I often get into trouble for mispronouncing the name of the artificial island in the Limmat where one can spend long summer evenings enjoying a cold beer and watching old people dancing. Apparently, it isn't called the Bauschwanzli at all...

Well, youngsters in the northeastern Midwest sure like heck do. And it's listed in Wictionary, Urban Dictionary, Open Wiki etc. and yields 24'900 Google hits, obviously most of them from the US of A.

When I was a teenager I remember we used to do that infix thing (not with 'that' adjective, mind you, we'd have had our mouths washed out...)

We thought it was a Britishism.