Linguists are spokespersons for the chief
(the title is not the actual quote (see below) - after all our feminist linguistic discussions I just couldn't leave it with 'spokesman')
This is a little passage from Crystal about Global English that made me laugh out loud:
(It do wonder how they got to these meanings for heavy and brutal. The others seem like more or less likely misunderstandings in a colonial setting - but these??)
This is a little passage from Crystal about Global English that made me laugh out loud:
In Ghana, we find heavy in the sense of 'gorgeous' and brutal in the sense of 'very nice', and a number of semantic shifts, including maiden name meaning 'given name' (applied to males) and linguist meaning 'spokesman for the chief'.(Crystal 2003: 160f.)
(It do wonder how they got to these meanings for heavy and brutal. The others seem like more or less likely misunderstandings in a colonial setting - but these??)
I would personally trace this back to fewer social restrictions on 'taboo' words (this concerns especially religious and sexual terms; cf. also 'huere' in Swiss German). Moreover, it seems to me that in a situation of (non-native) bilingualism, negative/taboo words often don't retain the intensity of negative associations as they have in their original environment. As an example, German speakers who have English as an L2 often use words such as 'fuck' or even 'cunt' in 'normal' colloquial speech (i.e. 'Umgangssprache'), while they would be seen as vulgar in English.
When I studied in Neuchâtel, it happened several times that I picked up rather crude words from a (male...) friend - which got me very surprised looks when I used them in different situations/ with different people... I think this 'sensitivity' to the exact associations of a term is one of the hardest things to get in a foreign language, even if you speak it very well otherwise. (And of course, people sometimes have veeery different thresholds as to what counts as offensive...)
I guess in your case also the fact that your friend is male played an important role - in many languages, registers attributed to female and male speakers can be quite different, and while it is accepted that guys use vulgar or colloquial words, people may perceive these terms as stronger if they are uttered by a woman. If women are expected to be more polite than men, deviations from these expectations may appear more grave (just read Janet Holmes' "Men, Women, and Politeness" (though I wasn't too fond of it..)).
I think I've got a similar issue because I learnt a large part of my English from Beng, even if he does not usually speak very colloquially (at least not to me). Nonetheless, this has resulted in an odd mixture, I've recently noticed, as another large part of my linguistic knowledge derrived from rather formal written English...