Background: We’re having a party tomorrow and I’ve invited my whole group from work. The boss can’t make it because he’s out of the country. The boss is Malasian, more or less anative English speaker though his dialect is very different than mine; everyone else in the group is Taiwanese, and speaks Mandarin and good but not always idiomatic English.
Yesterday I sent out a map to my house, and the boss and I had the following email exchange, both ccd to the whole group:
Him: Boo-Hoo-Hoo! So sad, will miss the party
Me: We’ll hoist a cold one for ya. (<== beer-drinking idiom)
I figured he'd recognize the idiom but that it might be unfamliiar to others, hence the explanation in parentheses. Apparently I wasn't quite explanatory enough; two of my coworkers came over this morning to ask about it. The part that surprised me was when they asked about *his* comment too - I should have realized but have forgotten how differently sound, like crying, can be written in different cultures. The funniest part was when A said, "I thought perhaps he was trying to write in Chinese and had a funny spelling - 'bu hao' ". It means, "not good", so she's not far off!
Have a great party!
Like the comment you sent me about the soup. Yum!