“My friends and I are using ‘assim você me mata’ a lot, because of that stupid goddamm song that never gets out of your head.”
— marcelagw, referencing — I assume — this.
Previously: Mandarin / Urdu / Persian / Aphasia / Original
“
… in chinese there’s a lot of homophones with the character. so different words typically with complete different meanings can be written to represent something different. For example a lot of teens write “tea set,” which is pronounced “bei ju,” but they actually mean “tragedy” because tragedy is pronounced the exact same way. there’s also a word that translates literally to “grass dirt horse,” but really means f — your mom (this is another homophone pun.)
There are others that are just a bit out there, like “get soy sauce” means none of my business. They also call rookies “vegetable bird.” They also call fans “vermicelli,” because the chinese word for verimicelli “feng si” actually sounds like fans. People who study abroad from china are known as “sea turtles” due to a homophone pun. Also: they use this character (囧) as basically an emoticon for shocked but it’s an actual character.
”— cestmavieelleestennuyeux.
Previously: Urdu / Persian / Aphasia / Original
“urdu: baal mundvaate hi oole padhgae (translates to: ‘It hailed right when i shaved my head’), used when you’re faced with a sudden situation xD”
—
“That German guy on youtube sure has words to say about daddy long legs …”
— didyoudrinkmygingerale.
At first, I had no idea what that meant, but then I discovered the video, and it’s a wonderful bit of aphasia.
“Hah yeah my first language is persian so there was a saying called we eat the ground ‘zamin xordan’ lol”
— persianlarimarmeow.
That is a great phrase.
New followers!
I’m curious. If English isn’t your first language, is there a phrase you heard recently in your first language — idiomatic, hilarious, or pretty — that struck you? If so, what was it?
Five Links:
- A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. (from March.)
- Secret History of Chicago Music: Sunnyland Slim — You Put That Thing On Me, Come Home Baby, Tin Pan Alley.
- To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson’s books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn’t expect. In this Sweden, the country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors … (n+1)
- Montenegro wants a language! Montenegro wants a language!
- How do Americans get to work?
I love languages, both living and dead.
Here’s a new one (for me, at least) — no tenses, no plural forms, no numbers over five.
