Bom Dia: When a Greeting Becomes a Threat Depending on Your Passport

Language is the original source of diplomatic incidents.  Long before governments issued formal protests and summoned ambassadors, ordinary people were accidentally threatening each other across linguistic borders with perfectly innocent intentions.

“Bom dia” is the Portuguese greeting for “Good morning.”  It is warm, cheerful, and entirely benign.  A Brazilian walking into a café, a Portuguese businessman greeting a colleague, a Mozambican answering the phone — all of them saying, with genuine friendliness, “Good morning.”

In Malay, the same two words mean something considerably less convivial.  “Bom” is bomb.  “Dia” is him.  “Bom dia” — bomb him.  A perfectly ordinary morning greeting in Lisbon is a direct incitement to violence in Kuala Lumpur.

This is not an isolated linguistic curiosity.  Language is riddled with these collisions.  The English word “gift” means poison in German.  “Bless you” in English is an entirely different proposition in several Slavic languages.  “Preservativo” in Spanish means condom, not preservative, which has caused a specific category of culinary confusion in Spanish-speaking countries when English food labels are translated without sufficient care.

The phenomenon has a name in linguistics: false cognates, or more entertainingly, “false friends” — words that look or sound alike across languages but carry entirely different meanings.  They are the linguistic equivalent of a firm handshake delivered to someone whose cultural norm is a bow.  The intent is goodwill.  The execution is a misunderstanding.

Bom dia, then.  Good morning. Or maybe not, depending on your audience.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters