More entertainment

Hi there, friends of kitchenlinguistics, and greetings from France.

By the way, the alleged inability and / or unwillingness of the French people to speak English is not true.

In the last post I relayed a traffic joke ("Straßenunterhaltung"), so here's a traffic sign in France which German-speaking people might find funny:

The actual theme for today's post is: jokes which require knowing multiple languages to be funny (and even then it's questionable).

This kind of loose or awkward connection between topics is called a "donkey's bridge" ("aasinsilta") in Finnish. The term is clearly adopted from German ("Eselsbrücke"), but it means something different in German: "a clever method used to remember something".

So here's a joke from my husband:

"What's the slogan for French low-carb enthusiasts? No pain, no gain."

(Pain = bread in French.)

And one from me:

"Penis size is not normally distributed. There is a long tail."

("Tail" in German, "Schwanz", is a slang word for penis.)

I tried to think how to end this post smoothly, but I couldn't come up with anything. What's the word for a clumsy or an awkward ending?

Full body sweat

My better half and me fear that our Finnish will over time become a relic of how Finnish was in 2011 when we moved out of the country. We won't lose the language, because we still speak it together (as much as married people speak, anyway), but at some point we will hopelessly lose touch with how it's used in Finland.

To prevent this, we often ask our Finnish visitors to give us an update on what's going on in the new language. One time it resulted in a hilarious sweat-related conversation which I will relay here.

In the summer, your might sweat so much that dark spots appear in your T-shirt around your armpits. In modern Finnish, these spots are apparently called "policemen" (poliisit).

Then the discussion turned into Finnish sweat-related army slang. It turns out that there are several handy slang words for describing how exactly you are sweating.

For example:

kahi - kainalohiki - armpit sweat

pehi - persehiki - ass sweat

muhi - munahiki - dick sweat (*)

pahi - pallihiki - ball sweat

kovahi - kokovartalohiki - full body sweat

(*) Literally, muna means "egg", but it's a slang word for dick. It makes no sense. I am so sorry.

It would be much more logical if egg would refer to testicles, like it does in other languages (for example German). There must have been a linguistic confusion at some point.

The only explanation I have is that the plural "eggs" (munat) means the male genital area in general, and somehow it then happened that the singular then started to mean the most prominent body part in the area.

The upside is that this provides endless amusement for our weekend breakfasts which often involve eggs in one form or another. Every time we come up with at least 3-5 egg-related statements or jokes. It never gets old.

Entertainment

The only purpose of this post is to route bad puns.

So I got this picture from a German friend of mine. He thought I would find it funny, which I did.

I immediately thought of a colleague of mine who actively reads this blog and who will surely find this funny too. So here you go.

(If you don't speak enough German to understand the "joke", I'm sorry. It's too dry to be explained.)

I'll route here another joke which is funnier but unintentional. During last year's Oktoberfest, the Munich police thanked neighboring countries for collaboration (the last paragraph on the page). Or at least tried to.

"Das Polizeipräsidium München begrüßt die engagierte Unterstützung aus Italien und Frankreich. Polizeivizepräsident Robert Kopp ergänzt dazu: "Diese gemeinsamen Steifen sind ein sichtbares Zeichen einer beispielhaften internationalen polizeilichen Zusammenarbeit. Wir freuen uns, dass wir diese auch heuer in der bewährten Form fortsetzen können.""

"The Munich police headquarters welcome the dedicated support from Italy and France. Police vice president Robert Kopp adds: "These joint patrols boners are a visible sign of exemplary international police collaboration. We're happy that we can continue in this established form this year too.""

Taken into account that most women visiting Oktoberfest wear Dirndls...

... that is somewhat easy to believe.