this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
849 points (95.1% liked)

Funny: Home of the Haha

5222 readers
1024 users here now

Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.

Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!

Our Rules:

  1. Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.

  2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.

  3. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.


Other Communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 105 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

That's a latin phrase that's heavily used in Italian as well in regard to death. It's not something they'd be ignorant about.

[–] [email protected] 121 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Almost like the scenario is faked

[–] Aurenkin 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Whaaaatt, who would do such a thing?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Certainly not someone who'd add text to the top with a skull emoji!

[–] Aurenkin 7 points 11 months ago

smh...what's the world coming to when you can't even trust a random stranger on the internet anymore.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As a foreigner in The Netherlands (were, unlike say in the US, there really isn't any expectation that foreigners have good knowledge of the language) I would often play the "I'm just an ignorant foreigner" card and purposefully misinterpret an expression for humouristic purposes.

So what I'm saying there is that maybe one of the sides of this story genuinelly believed it: when you're the one playing the "ignorant foreigner" game, it's the native speaker's shocked reaction that makes it funny.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

True, but having synonyms for sleep/rest and peacefully/in peace might be tough. Though I’m now realizing that “in peace” is a complicated phrase, given that peace here would be a locative attribute. But it is Latin and would therefore be pretty accessible to Italian speakers.

I don’t know, but I realized this year after living in Germany for four years, that I was saying the wrong word for humid. Instead I was saying “gay,” basically, though the connotation is slightly closer to queer than gay (if a right wing politician talked about gay people, it would feel normal. Non bigots use mostly this term, but if a right wing politician called them schwul instead of homosexuell, it would feel very bad). They sound pretty similar, so imagine if there was a bad joke about queer skies tonight or something, that was frequently made by bigots. I knew the word for gay, I just thought they got the word for gay from humidity, the way English got gay from happy.

I have a light accent that only about 20% of people in casual conversations pick up on. Casual conversations, like those about the weather. I’m pretty sure everyone thought I was just a homophobe for a long time 🤦

Sorry super long comment, but non native speakers make weird fucking mistakes sometimes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

God I couldn’t get to sleep last night, it was just too gay in my bedroom.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Yup, basically. The worst part is, because it is an existing joke, nobody ever corrected me, they thought it was intentional.

I literally only found out because I said it two days in a row to a queer coworker, and the second time, she was like “you know that’s not right, right?” and I’m pretty sure the blood immediately drained from my face.

I then told everyone I knew in case they’d been feeling uncomfortable around me :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just thought they got the word for gay from humidity

We have but it's a bit more complicated. "Schwul" is the old form (for hot and humid) and changed in analogy to "kühl" (~chilly/cool/cold). Simultaneously, homosexuality is associated with warmth for some reason. There is also "warmer Bruder" (warm brother).

So "schwul" was historically used for both senses "hot and humid" and figuratively for "gay", the literal sense changed vowel to be similar to another temperature related word, while the figurative sense didn't and they separated into two distinct words.

Extra difficult since the ü-sound isn't easy for many 2nd language learners so this happens quite often even if people know I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you so much! I have an etymological dictionary for German, but I haven’t found anything for slang- do you know if something like that exists?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

wiktionary is quite resourceful. Often the English page is even better but it's worth checking both.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

OP never played Assassin’s Creed 2

(The OP from the texts, not OP on lemmy)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Go on, tell your friends to rest in peace.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

And now you grow still.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's a phrase in swedish as well so i'd frankly assume any language that has been touched by the slimy tentacle of latin has it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I can tell you it does not have the death connotation at all in Portuguese, which is also a latin language.

In fact in Portuguese "rest in peace" would be an absolutelly normal thing to say if for example somebody had mentioned their neighbhours are noisy and they were going for a rest (though a more general wishing for a good rest to others, would be something that translates to "rest well" rather than "rest in peace" and specifically for people going to sleep it would be "sleep well").

This is maybe because the word by word translation of "in peace" in Portuguese has a double meaning, of both "in peace" and "peacefully" depending on context, since the language has no specific word for "peacefully", so people might say what is word by word "rest in peace" whilst meaning "rest peacefully".

It would thus be understandable for a native portuguese speaker whose domain of the english language is still at a mid level (were they tend to translate things word by word) to in the right context (to somebody who has complained that his or her rest or sleep tends to be disturbed by outside factors) to wish somebody going to sleep using the English language words "rest in peace", totally oblivious to how his or her word by word translation from the Portuguese carries a whole different meaning in English.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It's kind of the same in Italian tbh. Granted, I would probably never say "riposa/dormi in pace" without context as a "goodnight", but the example you made (noisy neighbors) or maybe the fact that the friend didn't want to go out due to being tired can lead to the use of that expression. It is still fairly uncommon, but possible (whether or not the post is fake or not).

[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I once told my friends I'll be back in a bit, I have to put my kids to sleep. They told me that sounds ominous af.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I loved hassling my friend when he'd say he'd "be on after he puts [daughter] down"

Brother, please don't euthanize your child.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I mean we've all had those days

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You call that crayon art???

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

It's honestly for the best-- they're in a better place now.

Safe in bed.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

At my school a parent of a particularly bad student once told teachers after the exams that his son "passed away".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To mean that he passed his class?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Maybe passed out

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Any Italian would say he 'pasta way'.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Reminds me of "it doesn't matter" in my second language English class. We all said together as a class "it's not grave" when asked what we thought "ce n'est pas grave" was in English.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The worst part is that technically isn't incorrect in English. Conversationally, most people might take a second, but grave does also mean serious

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Absolutely if someone said "it's not grave" to me I would understand it to mean "it's not serious" or "it's not very important"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Man, language is wild. If I heard "It's not grave", after assuming English as a second language, I'd immediately jump to assuming something like "it's not vital" complete with emphasis. Similar to saying "nobody will die if this isn't done, but we'd all really rather it was done" as the subtext.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Sounds correct Im wondering if it instead comes from latin infact in italan witch is the most similar language we have the same word grave (with a different pronunciation ) to mean something important (not grave something not that important ) but grave its also an old word meaning something heavy like in old physics experiments ... So maybe it became to be as something like it's not a weight that heavy for me to carry if u don't do this thing ... more tied to the metaforical uncomfortableness given by a heavy weight ... feel free to correct me I have never done latin at school ... ( fun fact Yes more Italian than u think has done at least 5 years of latin )

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

It could be a grave misunderstanding

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In German "it doesn't matter" means "es ist egal" (literally something like "it is equal" but "egal" is only used in this sense). When I played a board game with a Spanish native speaker, I asked "how many points do you have?" And he said "es ist egal", intending to say "we are equal" but I was like "it sure does matter" and he thought I didn't believe him that he reached me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Well don't keep us hanging

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Someone I know who is learning English just told me yesterday after a difficult task that he's on his last few cell brains. He meant brain cells. The order in which words are spoken are often reversed from Spanish to English and the results from a new speaker are often quite humorous.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Learning a new language is a humbling experience for sure, lol. You just have to roll with these kinds of mistakes and learn to find the humor in them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

When I was starting to learn dutch I commonly said the dutch word for "doctor" when I meant a medical doctor, because in every other language I knew at the time (my mother tongue and 2 other languages I learned at school) you could use the same word for both "medical doctor" and "somebody with a doctorate" (though in English you can also use "physician").

Dutch does NOT use the same word for both and in fact it's quite different ("arts" for the medical one, "doktor" for the other one), which was a really hard one to adjust to because of just how uniquelly so (within my experience) that was.

When you trip on something like that again and again you definitely just have to roll with it and mentally go "Oops, I did it again" ;)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

So inappropriate. It's much more reasonable to tell your friend to sleep... tight.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Someone needs to play Assassin’s Creed 2.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

requiescat in pace

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't check out, "rest in peace" can literally be translated as the very close "riposa in pace" which means the exact same thing.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Makes for a nice story though, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Rest in piece.

load more comments
view more: next ›