Post Punk Kitchen Forum

hehe. this was when i first met Mr Torque and I didn't speak Japanese yet- i spoke a weird mix of Puerto Rican and Spain Spanish, and my best friend spoke Italian from Napoli, and he and his friends spoke what we here call "portuñol"- basically portuguese with a spanish accent. When you consider that the average spanish speaker can't even really communicate with portuguese speakers in real life [and vice versa, based on anecdotal observations here, not to say it's impossible; uruguayans seem to have a clear advantage though], you can imagine how many cock-ups we had.

Ha! Wilson and I speak portuñol to each other! I got so frustrated at this New Year's Eve part trying to order wine and the bartender couldn't understand me, so I huffed at Wilson--What's going on?! And he's responded, "Um, baby, you're speaking Spanish. He can't understand you." I really thought I was speaking Portuguese though!

I thought of you last night when Wilson was telling me the letter he got from the Federal Police "...mira como shiitake, man."

i tell you, english just has better-tasting profanity.

Sprachgefühl

There's a word for Schadenfreude in Croatian: zluradost. Zlo=evil, harm. Radost= joy.

There's no word for sibling. But, there are several words for aunts and uncles depending on the relation:
stric - father's brother
strina - father's brother's wife
ujak - mother's brother
ujna - mother's brother's wife
tetka - mother's or father's sister
tetak - mother's or father's sister's husband

There's only one word for niece and only one word for nephew, though.

For prozvonit my former room-mate would say "give me a beep".

Guys, I just searched the forum for foie gras or faux gras and I also found "mardi gras" -so I'm just curious: have you ever heard anyone saying "fat tuesday"? How would you say it in <your language>?

In Italian it would be "martedi grasso" but it's really just "Carnevale"

Yes, people here sometimes call it fat tuesday, but usually mardi gras. I don't remember where, but I've seen a bar called Fat Tuesday's.

we don't have a special word for the day before Ash Wednesday- Carnaval is (at least) two days here and we call it Carnaval Monday and Carnaval Tuesday.

"Fat Tuesday" = "Masni utorak". No, I've never heard that. It's called "mesopust" - "devoid of meat". Or "karneval". Or "fašnik" from German "Fastnacht". Or "maškare" from "mask" ("maškara" is singular for a masked person, "maškare" is plural). Or "poklade" (I don't know the etymology of that).

A word that recently sprung up in my house (hehe) and i had to explain is
bakamoyashi [japanese] - that one sprout in the garden that shoots up way before all the other sprouts, then gets fried to a fizzle and never yields anything. Every time I plant seeds there's one of these. In fact my whole last crop of cilantro was a bunch of bakamoyashi.

Cute! I'll try to remember that one!

I'm trying to remember the Yiddish word for a person who is always giving advice, but it's escaping me. Anyone?

Nudnik? Kibbitzer?

I think one of the things that I miss the most from the US is the almost constant presence of Yiddish in my life (i am a Christian who grew up amongst New York Jews, as did my mother). Every so often my daughter will give me a "huh?" and I realize that I've been inserting Yiddish words again and I'll have to explain. She'll ask why I use something from a culture that's not even my own and i just assume that all new yorkers speak a little yiddish, especially the spicier words. But it makes me sad to think she won't know verklempt or shmutz or meshuggenah or all the other words that i just soaked up growing up as the neighborhood shiksa.

It's so true! I grew up in Westchester and both my parents are New York Jews. Everyone I knew growing up spoke a little Yiddish, Jewish or not. I was amazed when I moved to the midwest and nobody understood those words.

I use Yiddish words, but only because of my affinity for MAD magazine. TRS knows the word fershlugginer because of this.

I'm from the US South, my grandmother is Cajun from Louisiana. We say Fat Tuesday.



Yenta?

I think kibbitzer is what I was thinking of. Yiddish just has such good words!