Speech & Conversation In Dreams

[Frideswide]

This is a thing!

It's a kind of hoary old chestnut tale, emanating out of old Home Guard and/or SOE stories from WWII. If one wasn't sure that an apparently Brisih person wasn't a German spy, then you could steer the convo to squirrels. It was supposedly nigh-impossible for a natively German speaking person to pronounce.

It's surmised that this little nugget of nuttery led to phrase 'secret squirrel' : https://www.sandboxx.us/news/spy-culture-what-is-a-secret-squirrel/

I do know that several scots of my acquaintance find squirrel a hard word to say so anyone recognises it. I'm one of them.

The sq is easy enough but after that it's just a rolling of the rrrrrrrrrrrrr

I tend to point and use phrases such as yon furry wee ned with the tail...

 

[AgProv]

Recently I have been dreaming that I can speak Dutch, everyone else is speaking Dutch and its all fine, I also have a doctorate and I am happily explaining my latest thesis to an appreciative group- in Dutch.

Bit embarrassing to wake up muttering gibberish and having to recalibrate to being a monoglot with a sprinkling of A levels and a level 6 in Occupational Safety.

Had that. Dreamt I was speaking Afrikaans to Dutch people and their response was the usual gamut of "Oh Christ, one of THEM." Or the kind of semi-comprehension you get while each side is adjusting to the other (In Dutch, "bliksem" merely means "lightning", and words like "baie" are unknown.) - to Dutch people kindly trying to adjust my speech to more formal grammatical Dutch, rather than that awful dialect....

 

[AgProv]

This is a thing!

It's a kind of hoary old chestnut tale, emanating out of old Home Guard and/or SOE stories from WWII. If one wasn't sure that an apparently Brisih person wasn't a German spy, then you could steer the convo to squirrels. It was supposedly nigh-impossible for a natively German speaking person to pronounce.

It's surmised that this little nugget of nuttery led to phrase 'secret squirrel' : https://www.sandboxx.us/news/spy-culture-what-is-a-secret-squirrel/

Thus the shibboleth "Weymouth War Weapons Week".

 

[escargot]

This is a thing!

It's a kind of hoary old chestnut tale, emanating out of old Home Guard and/or SOE stories from WWII. If one wasn't sure that an apparently Brisih person wasn't a German spy, then you could steer the convo to squirrels. It was supposedly nigh-impossible for a natively German speaking person to pronounce.

It's surmised that this little nugget of nuttery led to phrase 'secret squirrel' : https://www.sandboxx.us/news/spy-culture-what-is-a-secret-squirrel/

There's also sentence construction. In Noel Streatfield's wartime children's novel The Children of Primrose Lane, the German spy speaks English with a perfect accent.

He is identified as German when he is asked why he chose to serve in the navy over another service.
His use of the phrase (from memory) 'The sea is more interesting for me' aroused suspicion because it sounded foreign.