The English language is full of quirks and inconsistencies and you have to look no further than spellings and their pronunciations to feel sorry for any foreigner trying to learn it for the first time. As an example take the combination ‘ough' and consider the varied pronunciations of ‘cough', ‘bough', ‘through' and ‘thought' - how do we explain the different sounds generated by an apparently consistent spelling? It's no wonder then that innocent foreigners doing battle with our language on our territory come unstuck with alarming regularity.

Our friend Markus from Munich was a first class example. Coming to Derbyshire on summer work experience and straight out of college in Landshut, he was pitched right in at the deep end and one of the first greetings he experienced was the classic ‘Ey up mi duck!' What on earth was he supposed to make of that, and how was he expected to respond? He would try hard to find the right words and pronunciations instead of working around the problem hoping that someone would give him a clue as to correct grammatical construction. Even then we got some real howlers. We had just finished dinner one evening, and he pushed away his empty plate informing all at the table that he was now ‘fed up'. He didn't understand why we were so amused as he has been fed, was satisfied, and was therefore fed up to the top.

Even when the unfortunate stranger has got to grips with our language, he or she is then faced with a plethora of individual and general colloquial phrases and sayings, each of which has no real meaning outside of its local area. To illustrate this point a number of examples from a variety of family members and friends follows, and I make no apology for the level of embarrassment caused to those people - actually it gives me a lot of perverse amusement, so here goes.

It's always best to get potential disasters out of the way fairly early in the proceedings, and I can feel a slap coming on so I'll deal with my wife, Lynn first. Lynn isn't colloquial, doesn't speak with a local dialect and only strays into Barnsleyese when we are in South Yorkshire visiting relatives. Nevertheless she does come out with some corkers, and the one that springs immediately to mind is ‘Have you seen these moles on your back?' Now how can I possibly have achieved this feat of personal gymnastics without being deformed in some way? Should I carry a mirror on a stick around with me at all times so that a constant watch can be kept on an ongoing situation? I don't know and you could get some very funny looks from passers by if you did.

Gavin, her dad, used to say ‘What does it look like when you find it?' if he saw you searching for something, and it was apt to catch you unawares. Before you knew it you were full tilt into a detailed description before you noticed that he was wearing one of those grins which would have made the Cheshire Cat proud. Another favourite phrase was ‘By crikey, that was heavy' if he picked up something hot. I never did figure out why something with too much heat could be described using an adjective relating to weight.

Joyce, Lynn's mum, is indiscriminate in her use of the Yorkshire dialect in order to make a point. Someone having a good opinion of themselves would be described as ‘Havin moor edge than t'corsey edge', and a departing salutation of ‘See you later' invariably gets the response ‘Nor if I see yoo fust!'. She and the rest of her family from Barnsley would use the mild and sometimes affectionate insult of calling you a ‘tiercake'. Now I thought that a tier cake was something like a wedding cake built up in a number of layers, or tiers. It was years before I learned that the word ‘tier' was a corruption of ‘tea' and that the intention was to compare you to a pastry containing sultanas. Even now I cannot make sense out of this because the implication is that you are as stupid as this item of food, and to my certain knowledge food does not have the character or capacity for random acts of silly behaviour, but we'll let that pass for now.

Lisa tries her best to use the Derbyshire dialect but she's not consistent. It flits in and out of her conversation like some demented butterfly on drugs, and the overall effect is total confusion as you fail to grasp the meaning of the phrase she is trying to use. It's also important that the delivery is made with some depth of voice not exactly ‘basso profundo', but she cannot get down to this level thus rendering her attempt quite comical at times. She also has the kind of voice that can crack a glass at twenty paces, so we try to keep all breakables at least twenty-one feet away from her. Still, bless her, she tries her best and gives us hours of unlimited pleasure in her battle with the Derbyshire accent.

James has reached the age when he is sometimes funny without quite realising what he has said, but at other times he tries the odd comic phrase and it falls flat. One really good example occurred in the car when we were bringing him back from Sutton ice rink with his friends, and you have to keep your ears open - you just never know what you might hear. They were talking amongst themselves about other students in their year at school and out popped ‘He's so stupid, he shouldn't have been allowed in the gene pool - not even at the shallow end'. I had to keep a very straight face especially since I was driving and both Lynn and I knew who he was referring to.

Even allowing for these highly personalised assaults on the English language, there is a considerable number of other more general statements of opinion and fact which are there lying in await for the unwary traveller through our grammatical structure. How else can you explain such phrases as ‘Its gone black over Bill's mothers' or ‘I'll make you laugh on the other side of your face in a minute'? How is any foreigner expected to know where Bill's mother lives, or why they appear to be the only person who doesn't? Also, how on earth can you laugh on either or both sides of your face without being hideously deformed in some way, and why does the whole process take such a short time to perform? I don't know (again).

We tell our children that they can shout and scream ‘Till the cows come home, and it won't make any difference'. What time do the cows come home? Does someone time them? I ask this because it's really unfair to tell a child that they can do something without giving them a time frame for reference, otherwise they'll carry on screaming, get themselves a seriously sore throat, and you'll end up with the headache of a lifetime whilst simultaneously losing the will to live.

I've also heard comments made on peoples' physical attributes, like ‘she had a face like a bag of spanners' and ‘he could eat an apple through a tennis racquet with teeth like that'. Whilst these graphic phrases may mean something to us, and we acknowledge them with a wise nodding of the head, pity the poor outsider who is left wondering at the shape and consistency of a number of spanners of varying shapes and sizes inside a supermarket carrier bag. Try to help them relate this to someone's facial characteristics and you come close to appreciating the difficulties they face. Then try to reconcile the actual effort involved in attempting to consume anything through a set of nylon wires and you are bound to ask why this would be attempted in the first place and wonder at the potential for disfigurement if it were successful.

We also comment on such weighty topics as meanness, and whilst the statement that someone has ‘short arms and long pockets' would not be too difficult for someone like our friend Markus to work out, he would struggle with the glib criticism that ‘she'd skin a flea for threepence'. How would he be expected to make sense out of that? Economically it would be a disaster since this kind of activity would have to be mechanised on an industrial scale in order to make any profit at all, and the thought of a room full of labourer's working madly away on some piece rate scheme defies all logic. Put the additional barrier of regional dialect in the way, and you have yourself a ‘No Go' area of significant magnitude.

Go back to the title ‘Funny You Should Say That' and ask yourself what the foreigner would make of this. Is it really funny in the comical sense, or merely a comment on the oddity of a certain situation? You see, here again we  carelessly use the same word to illustrate vastly different emotional circumstances and expect all who hear it to concur with our grammar. Even when you compare two societies like the UK and the USA which are ‘divided by a common language' the same idiosyncrasies are apparent, so what chance does the poor non-English speaker have?