Ladies shouldn’t experience too much confusion when hearing this word in Papua New Guinea. I’d have to find out if it applies to all women or strictly European women, but I’m willing to guess most women might hear this one at some point or another during their stay.
Today’s word is a Pidgin (Tok Pisin) word used in Papua New Guinea:
misis – European woman
As noted in Wikipedia the word ‘tok’ means word or speech and the word ‘pisin’ means pidgin and is a Creole language spoken by about 4 million people as a second language and over a hundred thousand as a first. It is spoken in the northern mainland of Papua New Guinea. If you scroll down further you’ll find a nice list of words and some pronunciation examples. As an added bonus you can learn even more words by venturing into the online Tok Pisin phrasebook, also provided by Wiki. They’ve actually got a great handful of links which I suggest going through them all if you’re really into learning this lang. One last site I’ll note here though is Robert Eklund’s Tok Pisin page. It had pictures of signs, people and some audio clips. Looks a winner to learning the very basics.