h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hope I wasn't annoying you too much in the Limericks thread, because really, you're right, both meter and rhyme are important!

Don't worry - I don't get annoyed that easily. It is only a game but the limericks are better when they follow the rules.

So, can you tell us - what *does* hilal mean?

Hilal - it is the crescent moon (alliteration from Arabic). It is also used as a name and it has a double edged meaning. The crescent moon before no moon or the one after. Muslims look to the new moon as it grows. The old moon goes to nothing.

Ah, thanks! I have a classmate by that name, a woman, but I've also heard it as a men's name. Nice name, though!

I got well screwed by an Omani of that name so it has a bad meaning for me. It was my wife - Fatima - who told him the meaning in Arabic. "You go down" she told him. She has also just tolld me that she has never heard the name used for a woman. However there are different conventions throughout Arabia.

The girl I know by that name is from the same region of Turkey as my uncle, the highlands of Anatolia, it may be different there.

That probably explains it - Turkey is very different apart from being a different language. Good luck anyway.

Yes, I've noticed, there was a lot of friction on a Uni trip because an Arab referred to a Tunesian as "Habibi" in the presence of hir Turkish girlfriend, apparently it has very different connotations.

Yes - everyone, here in Morocco, laughs at me as I call fatima habibiti and she calls me habibi (a habit picked up in the Middle East). Here it is something that you only say in private. In the Middle East it is a bit like Devon people saying 'yes me luvver'.

No, see, the Turkish girl thought the Arab man was flirting with her boyfriend!

Language is a wonderful thing, as long as these "mistakes" still happen, globalization is luckily not complete!

It's like I have an Indian friend I call Deepu, a short form of Deepanka, but little children assume I call him "the poo" and find it hilarious

When I first went to Dubai I asked an Indian draftsman "How do you spell ‘punkha’ (the ceiling fans). He just looked at me as if I was stupid. I repeated the question three times, getting increasingly frustrated. In the end he just said "F – A – N". Thereafter he continued to look at me as if I was stupid – but we became very good friends.

I love that kind of thing! Right now I'm trying to brush up my Dutch by watching all DVDs with Dutch subtitles, and some of the translations are hilarious!

I have been trying to brush up on my dutch but she's got a broken arm!!!

Sorry, confusion here...

'me ol' dutch' = wife in cockney slang. Famed in the song "We've been together now for forty years" about life in the workhouses where men and women were segregated however long they had been married.

Thanks for clearing that up! Cockney is an unknown language to me...

Its unknow to most people outside the East End of London - however, one interesting thing is that Australian (humour) contains similar rhyming slang. The reason seems to be that a large part of the original white population came from London prisons

I've heard OF it, but the terms themselves...

But I did notice that my Dutch has a strong Haags cast because I learned it almost exclusively from my father, who would use a lot of slang terms at home...