I can assure you, that “Gummi” is slang for a condom. At least in Austria and I’ve also heard it in Bavaria.

Greetings,

DrK

Oops, I guess she meant eraser.

Hmmm … fugu, anyone?

“Most often”.

Never touch the stuff myself, actually.

(However, being meat eater myself, I could not recommend any vegetarian sausage-knock-off either.)

http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/chapters/title.php

For we Americans, asking for a “fanny pack” will get you snicker if you are a male. It would be almost as embarrassing for a Brit lady to ask for a “fanny pack” only to ask “How the hell is it supposed to fit?”

But…you’ll have to look at the site to know what I mean.

Does anybody know a website that’s dealing with these differences.
Would be nice to know BEFORE our next trip to the US.

@BA: I really enjoy your site, and I like to read the postings in your blog, but what I like most are the movie reviews. Hope you’ll find the time to post more of those.

Back to the “rubber bears”:
My brother-in-law is a vegetarian (not a vegan, though), and he just loves Gummibärchen. I will ask him about the issue next time I see him.

BTW: as we are taught British English in school, of course we are asking for a “rubber” when we need an eraser. I find it very funny (and kinda disturbing, too) that no teacher EVER has warned us about the potential (almost 100% certain) misunderstanding.

That’s probably because teachers of British English are largely unaware of all the different ways in which American English differs.

Some of the differences are purely of spelling (colour / color, favour / favor, sceptic / skeptic etc.).

Some of the differences are of pronunciation (e.g. “schedule” is pronounced “shedule” in British English [obviously, after its Germanic roots], whereas it is pronounced “skedule” in American English [which is more consistent with other words such as "school"]; “tourniquet” is pronounced “turnikay” in British English [because the word is so clearly French in origin] but “tornikett” in American English [presumably as a direct anglicisation of the French spelling]).

Other differences are of the same words meaning different things (e.g. chips, vest, pants et al. all mean different things depending upon which side of the Atlantic you learned your English).

I am sure that there are a great many differences, and it would be a large undertaking to track them all down. Thus, your teachers were probably unaware that the British English term “rubber” (from “Indiarubber”, meaning an eraser) has a different connotation on the other side of the Atlantic (where it commonly means a condom).

My question is if vegetarians can eat “gummy bears” or not.

Depends on how strict they are.

I surprised a vegetarian just the other day by telling her that her bag of wine gums that she bought from M&S contained cow. It even said so on the bag that it contained “beef gelatin”.
She gave the rest of the bag to me.