Colin teaches English With Unexpected Results

If you can get over yourself for a minute and stop making fun of me, you'll appreciate the humor potential.

Last night, I went to dinner with my coworkers at a fancy restaurant. Our office is in the process of moving into a new larger building (true to their word, they put card key access on the server room door) and as good Italians, we used this event as an excuse to eat and drink. A brief recap of the meal: 4 appetizers, 4 main courses, a cheese course, and a desert. Total time: 4.25 hours. Total number of slices of lardo consumed: 6. Lardo is not the IT guy's nickname, it's cured pork similar to prosciutto except it's made entirely of fat. Imagine albino bacon. It's FANTASTIC. The whole dinner was good, but lardo made it special.

At one point during our dinner conversation a coworker teased me for mispronouncing a word. I hate the Italian triple vowel combinations, they're a full-mouth workout. In retaliation I decided to teach her some simple English. The two phrases I taught her were (1) "What are you up to?" pronounced, "Wha'cha up to?" and (2) "What is up, dog?" pronounced "'tsup, dawg?" It should be noted that they all speak English well enough to understand the phrase if ennuciated slowly.

This had unexpected results. Imagine walking into an office in the morning and hearing some guy go, "What's up dog." with zero intonation. Or, while we were packing some boxes today, I experienced this conversation: (in Italian)
me: What are you doing?
her: Cleaning the keyboard.
me: Don't you think you should turn off the computer first?
random guy passing by: "What's up dog"
me: What did you just say!?
her: What's with this "dog" thing! I totally don't get it, what's the point of putting that at the end of the sentence!? "Dog"!! Sheesh!

What's also funny about it is whenever one person says it, another guy nearby will want to be let in on the secret, and then what follows is a long winded explanation of "Cosa succede, cane?" explaining how the "dog" is an integral part of the sentence yet each person can't for the life of them explain what it actually means. I guess to them it would be like saying, "What's kickin', lampshade?"