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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/MooseyBee on 2024-10-10 21:43:42+00:00.

Years ago, a friend of mine was working as a research assistant in Germany. German is not her first language, but she was trying her best to learn it.

For one study, she meant to ask the patients to come to their weigh-ins and blood tests without having eaten anything. The German word for “shy” is schüchtern. The German word for “unfed” (literally “empty”) is nüchtern. Of course, it wasn’t detected by the spelling checker. And guess who made that small error in her emails to the patients?

You can imagine how shocked my friend was when her patients showed up and began joking with her; oversharing tiny details from their day, telling her about their bowel movements post-operation, and so on. Fortunately, it was only a handful of the hundreds of patients that she emailed who teased her about not being “shy” and everyone else who commented on it was kind.

Definitely a lesson well-learned :-)