I understand the meme and honestly thought you were serious in your comment to the point where I was hoping it to be true and went to look if that was the case.

Also what’s wooshing?

Yeah I’ve looked into wiki page for “false cognates” after leaving that reply, it would make sense to have a name for a situation where words from different languages sound similar and have similar definitions but are not etymologically related, but according to the wiki false cognates also can be words from the same language and I just don’t see the need to call them false cognates in this case, to my understanding they are called homonyms if they are identical in spelling and pronunciation but differ in etymology/definition, or homophones if they sound the same but are spelled differently. Vsauce made an awesome video on this topic a while ago.

False friends are for translators/interpreters, they are referred to as “translators’ false friends” because people make mistakes when making translations while having insufficient experience, like that example that you give with embarrassed and embarazada

Can you cite that? According to the official statistics the population of the whole region is around 1 032 000 people now and has been around 1 029 000 in 2021, the stats are mirrored in wiki, russian only:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Население_Калининградской_области

The official source is rosstat.gov.ru but my browser says that there is a potential security risk.

Always good check them facts

Cool didn’t know that, then it looks like DDG ai was right

Also “false cognates” seems to be either outdated concept or used here as a term that looks scienc-y to make the idea seem more legit, but in modern linguistics it’s probably just called homonymy and the words are called homonyms. It is also possible for a word to be both homonymous and polysemous but I don’t remember a good example in English. DDG ai summary gave me the word “bank” as an example, but it looks like as a noun it just has different meanings, not two different etymologies, so it’s just polysemy, not homonymy. The shorter the word, the higher the chance it is homonym or has multiple meanings/definitions.