In movies, when surprised or perplexed with a hint at being in trouble, a character, especially a young one (often a kid), would utter an interjection that might be transcribed as [ɒ'əʊ] with the tone falling down towards the second syllable (hope I made myself clear enough).

How can it be spelt?

I just realised that I often say as a parting gesture: "Cheers; thank you/thanks [a lot]/etc".

To me, "cheers" (by itself) seems too light/insincere or even sarcastic (almost like saying nothing at all), but "thank you" (by itself) sounds very stilted/forced.... yet together it comes naturally.

Is this normal/attested? I've never heard other people ( Read more... )

There are a lot of sites dedicated to obscenities and slang in Spanish, but even outside of the question of their reliability, they're way more hard-core than I want to get. A lot of them are actually kind of disturbing. But I do find that I 'stay in the language' when I'm studying one - continue trying to phrase things that I know how to say - ( Read more... )

This is more of a culture question than language, but I hope it's okay. If not, then we need a culturephiles community. lol ( Read more... )