Also from my Disqus history (and yes, this actually happened to me):
“I’d never heard of the term “nooner” until I came to the U.S. back in the mid-1980s. I thought it meant a lunchtime cocktail. So when I suggested to a couple of the ladies at the office that we nip out for a quick nooner… HR was not impressed.”
We tend to think people were made of sterner stuff, but back before World War II my Dad worked in a shipyard. One of the pieces of equipment they had (I really don’t know the details, I’m going from memory) was a drum around which cables would be wrapped, not sure if part of a crane or winch, or something else. The generally accepted term for this drum was a n*gg*r head. (Yeah, I censored it, HR exists here too). Some official folks came around and informed the workers that they could no longer refer to the drum as such, it was to be called a “spool”. Hilarity ensued, with jokes about sewing circles, and tea and cookies to be served, and shipyard workers asking to borrow thimbles.
“Nooner” has been supplanted by “morner.” It’s like a “nooner” only sooner.
Reminds me of the time I stopped conversation dead when I suggested I was going to “smack” someone “on the fanny”.
Apparently it means something quite different in the UK vernacular than it does in the North American one, or so I discovered.