Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Non-American Neologisms

The shorter of the short people told us the other day while we were out driving that the British term for a speed bump is a "sleeping policeman," something we all found funny.

The Russian term for a black hole is "frozen star," which comes comes the fact that space and time are so warped around it that objects entering into the event horizon appear to move slower and slower as they approach it. So much so, in fact, that at the event horizon time becomes frozen to observers outside.

Know any other cool neologisms from non-American, or at least non-mainstream American, linguistic communities?