What is a Spider II?

Just to pile on because I’m bored on a Sunday… Italian and European markets use spyder to mean convertible the same way, forever, Americans would use “Roadster.” There are a couple of other analogies, but I’m not sufficiently caffeinated to recall!

As Valerie points out, in French the word “important” most often means “considerable” or “significant”. It’s tripped me up, too.

I once hired a chemical engineer from Québec who learned English as a second language and hadn’t yet mastered it. During a staff meeting he made a comment following a presentation saying “What you have just said is a big deception.” The presenter was dumbstruck. Having stumbled on the word myself while working in Québec I was able to clarify. The French word “déception” translated into English is “disappointment”. The English “deception” is “tromperie” in French.

Online translators are notorious for bad syntactic parsing. (As frequently am I).

1 Like