What's the most wanky thing you have ever done?!

[lardylegs123]

I cringe when I think of this. First year of university, and I was studying Languages. I'm from a working class, Scottish family and was the first ever to go to university. Mother's Day comes and I thought it would be a nice idea to write out the card entirely in the languages I've been studying I thought mum would be so impressed, but she just looked at me and said 'but Lardylegs, I cannae understand a word'.
I think I was too busy being a pretentious dick, that I'd forgotten about this mere detail

@Hoppinggreen

I was doing a buffet and DH had asked me for a specific thing he liked. I went to Sainsburys and at the checkout I realised that I had forgotten the ingredients for this dish. No problem said the checkout lady, I will ask someone to get them for you, she summons a colleague and they ask what I need “quails eggs and caviar please” The look on their faces said it all (working class town in West Yorkshire)

Very very funny!

My friend brought me a fake Mulberry bag back from Shanghai many years ago. It was a great fake and leather and I used it loads. I'm not materialistic at all but for some reason once a work friend has ohhhed and ahhhed over it I behan to totally believe it was real! I even agreed with a high up visitor how much of a 'nightmare' it was having to wait on the list so long to get one! She called me 'so lucky' to have parents who recognised an investment (I was young). That would have been news to my very working class parents who would have been mystified by what Mulberry even was!🙈

Puffalicious. I worked with my boss for quite a few years before we found ourselves in Edinburgh together. His bewilderment when I switched from RP to a Scottish accent as we walked through Edinburgh airport!

I had a Glaswegian boyfriend for a few years so I can only be thankful it wasn't Glasgow we were in, and I didn't switch from RP to Glaswegian rhyming slang, because I can go that accent too.

I went to a northern comprehensive school in the 1980s. I applied to Oxford (which wasn't something anyone from my school had ever done) and was invited for interview and tour around the colleges etc.

Since my only 'experience' of Oxford was watching Brideshead Revisited I wore a 1920s dress, heels, jacket and straw boater to travel down by train and attend the day.
When I realised how overdressed I was I bought an oversized jumper from a charity shop and shoved the rest in a carrier bag to leave at the Porters Lodge .

And no, I didn't get a place!

I've noticed that among the Brits I've worked with who have been in the US, their accent softens but never really goes away completely. They do start using American words for things - soccer instead of football, trash instead of rubbish, etc.

At least where I am in the sourthern US, my English accent is so adored that I've deliberately never got rid of it in 27 years, though I could easily have, though I do say y'all now (which might possibly be a bit wanky on reflection...)

Probably the time when I was 13 and decided to refer to my mum as "dear mother". Not just to her face, but to all of my friends and teachers I genuinely thought I was living in some kind of Jane Austen novel!

Norma That is brilliant! You'd probably get away with it now, just look a bit retro.

I went from a rural comprehensive to Durham for interview, and embarrassingly decided to slip in the fact we had a cleaner at home, so they'd think I'd fit in ok. I still cringe now. I did get a place but was too embarrassed to take it up.

I was so ashamed about this that I didn’t even tell DH for about two years We were sold a really dodgy car and I kept ringing them and after being fobbed off by someone on the phone I demanded to know who they were and then said the immortal words ‘I want to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey’ He just went silent and said ‘that’s rude’

In my defence, shortly afterwards we found a FaceBook page of furious people who had all been conned by the same garage but still…..

I laughed at dd (19) when she started learning Latin as a fun hobby. She came straight back with the fact that I did a Masters degree in History for fun.

@ssd

Joined mn

Ditto

Been on here on and off for 17 years since ds was born and I haven't admitted to anyone I am on it. If anyone mentions MN in real life I feign ignorance and ask what it is 🤣

@lardylegs123

I cringe when I think of this. First year of university, and I was studying Languages. I'm from a working class, Scottish family and was the first ever to go to university. Mother's Day comes and I thought it would be a nice idea to write out the card entirely in the languages I've been studying I thought mum would be so impressed, but she just looked at me and said 'but Lardylegs, I cannae understand a word'. I think I was too busy being a pretentious dick, that I'd forgotten about this mere detail

I think your mum was being wanky in this example. I think most mums would have been impressed and would have taken an interest in working out what it said.

And Latin and Greek are not wanky!!

Not me, but my friend's mum watched Downton Abbey and started referring to their living room as the "drawing room" and their home office as the "library"

@troobleflooble - I think you mean effect change. (Pedantic but true.)

Not necessarily, @Musmerian. One can both affect change and effect change, it depends whether troobleflooble meant influence changes already made or create new changes.

I am prone to being pedantic and wanky myself!

@Crunchymum

So interesting, have experienced this myself living as an expat in a country I don’t feel at home in and don’t love. Hanging on to my home country accent for 12 years and counting.

Accents and speech aren't set in stone. Most people will have several different ways of talking, each appropriate to a specific situation. Kids will talk one way in the playground, slightly differently in the classroom, another way at home with their parents, differently again in chats with their siblings, maybe another way with extended family. It will be a mix of regionality, ethnicity and societal expectations. As you grow up this will develop more. I don't speak the same way to my elderly Irish MIL as I do to my little godson or when I'm addressing a group of 200 academic peers or as I might speak when buying fruit down the market.

Another one wishing that. @NormaSnorks had just worn and “owned” her BH clothes. Bet she’d have got a place for her sheer brilliant eccentricity.

Not me but a toddler in M&S food hall years ago. ‘I want my cwab, Mummy. Mummy, I want my CWAB”

Mummy picks up a tub of crab flakes.

Toddler “not that cwab! That CWAB. This one” pointing at the £20 half a dressed lobster with lemon and mayonnaise.

Mum refused to get it and she threw an epic tantrum

Bless her (no doubt) cashmere socks

I grew up in Australia, when I started uni in my 20s in my birth town I did everything I could to suppress it.
And one of my best mates was from NI, I remember pointing out pompously the difference between Derry and Londonderry to my parents.

When we were at university DP bought me a wine tasting for Christmas (got it for a bargain of £10 iirc). It was one of those ones where they come to your house and do it there. The only day we could do it turned out to be term time so the bloke had to come to my room with all his boxes of wine. What makes it extra wanky is that we went to Oxbridge and my room was in my college

@chesirecat99 and @Musmerian I think in context I meant 'to make new changes'. The fact that I may have said the wrong one just makes it worse! I think I was trying to sound intellectual but just came off sounding like a knob 😂

A normally sensible friend decided in her mid 50's to change her very ordinary English name to the Spanish version (Similar to Hilary/Hilaria). No one could remember and she got so fed up of correcting people, she gave up after around 6 months. Still no idea why she did it!

I do the accent thing if I'm not careful - I just absorb what I'm hearing and it comes out of my mouth.

Probably the most wanky time this happened was when I was on a school exchange to Germany and started speaking English with a German accent - it made me easier to understand by the Germans we were at school with, but my English friends took the piss mercilessly! Wasn't deliberate though.

Someone I worked with had an affected very breathy lispy voice when sober, which reverted back to broad and non-breathy Brum when she'd had a few. Apparently she did it to make herself seem more fragile & "girly" than she looked.

As a new cat owner, totally smitten, never had a cat before, went to register her at the vets. The questions were all: name, age, etc. Then they got to colour and I said champagne. There was a long pause then they said they didn’t have champagne in the drop down menu. I was trying to think of how else to describe her. Yellow seemed totally offensive & not at all representative of the depth of colour in her glimmering coat. Eventually they offered “gold” which I agreed on. Only after hanging up the phone did I think “god I’m a dick”.

My accent varies by about 400 miles depending on my state of mind and who I'm talking to - it's actually rather annoying, but it's not deliberate wankiness. I reckon it comes from moving around a lot as a kid and being a bit of a twit.

I'm definitely guilty of far wankier quasi-intellectual jokes to inappropriate audiences too. As I say, bit of a twit...