Examples of cross cultural misunderstandings are examined in this paper to show how cultural (contextual) meaning must be regarded as an integral feature of the overall semantic meaning of an utterance. The examples, taken from the Filipino dialect Tagalog, illustrate how ignorance of the cultural assumptions and attitudes associated with an utterance may well lead to misunderstanding and conflict. What is noteworthy about these examples is that, although they are commonplace and conventional, they conceal a dimension of meaning as long as the Tagalog speaker communicates with other Tagalog speakers, either in English or in Tagalog. When the speaker talks with a native speaker of English, however, potential problems not entirely obvious to either the speaker or the hearer may occur because the speaker uses lexical equivalents in the target language and the hearer adds a cultural dimension of meaning. For these reasons, foreign language instructors should insist on having cultural notes and comments included in second language learning texts and activities. (RL)