Oolite Bulletins

Selezen wrote:

There was another famous one... Some US president or something went to Frankfurt and declared proudly "ich bein ein frankfurter", which apparently means "I am a sausage of the frankfurter variety".

To say "I am a native of the city of Frankfurt", it's apparently "ich bein frankfurter".

Go figure.

There's strangely much fun with german towns and food

You could add these:
Hamburg / Hamburger
Kassel / Kasseler

Very funny are also those tour-shirts of bands. Düsseldorf becomes Dusseldorf, but Dussel is meant to say someone is behaving dumb

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& the really 'cute' thing about Dusseldorf:

Dussel Dorf = simpleton(s) village...

Much like Dumbarton!

Good point... They should be twinned!

Talking about dumb & city names, I'm kind of surprised no-one mentioned this one yet...

Do I win a prize for being the first?

Nice One Kaks - you are definitely a first (for many many reasons...)

Of course our American brethren find it v. amusing that we have a town called "Dorking" and of course Scunthorpe caused all sorts of issues with offensive word checkers on the internet/email systems the world over...

Kaks wrote:

Talking about dumb & city names, I'm kind of surprised no-one mentioned this one yet...

Do I win a prize for being the first?

Uh, oh, now you've done it.

My memory had this town placed in Scotland, but Wikipedia says Newfoundland & Labrador and I'm not about to wade through the 825000 google hits I got on a simple search.

And I'm absolutely not making any comment whatsoever on the Cephalocereus millspaughii, which I happened across on the disambiguation page.

Well, if you're having fun with town names like these, you might enjoy this one from Austria:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria

Best thing is, I've even got a picture of the traffic sign with another sign below it: "Bitte nicht so schnell" (Not too fast, please!)

Bavaria also has strange names, like the village Tuntenhausen (which probably would translate into fags village or something like that).

Edit:
Just saw that the Wiki entry already linked to the austrian village and it's even got some more funny entries at the bottom of the page:
>>Putting the problem in context, however, tz-online notes that numerous villages across the border in Germany have names that are "unfortunate" even in German, including Affendorf (Monkey Village), Faulebutter (Putrid Butter), Fickmühlen (Fuck Mill), Himmelreich (Kingdom of Heaven), Katzenhirn (Cat Brain), Plöd (Stupid), Regenmantel (Raincoat), Sklavenhaus (Slave House) and Warzen (Warts).<<

I personally always have a good laugh when I see the sign for Grauen im Moor in northern germany (would translate to horror in the moor)

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The only Swedish example I can think of offhand is Stockholm’s suburb Fittja. Its literal (dialectal) meaning is “water-meadow”; a word of similar etymology was originally a euphemism, but has lost all connection to the original meaning. Working out what “water-meadow” would be a euphemism for is left as an exercise to the reader.

Ahruman wrote:

The only Swedish example I can think of offhand is Stockholm’s suburb Fittja. It’s literal (dialectal) meaning is “water-meadow”; a word of similar etymology was originally a euphemism, but has lost all connection to the original meaning. Working out what “water-meadow” would be a euphemism for is left as an exercise to the reader.

Oh, Ikea can do funny things, too.

There's the bathroom-set and toilet brush called "Viren" (plural for virus in german) and the childrens bed "Gutvik" which, spelled in german, would be best translated to "good fuck". Would have been more appropriate for an adults double sized bed with noise reduction

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A car oriented one.

A variant of the Mitsubishi Shogun was released about twenty or so years ago called the “Pajero”.
A quality Spanish/English dictionary would translate that (politely) as “Masturbator”.
I often wonder if owners of "Pajeros" know this.

Whenever I see one I feel like giving the traditional salute.

Hmmm,

Gutvik => children
Shogun owner => pajero

Wow, everything makes sense!

El Viejo wrote:

A car oriented one.

A variant of the Mitsubishi Shogun was released about twenty or so years ago called the “Pajero”.
A quality Spanish/English dictionary would translate that (politely) as “Masturbator”.
I often wonder if owners of "Pajeros" know this.

Whenever I see one I feel like giving the traditional salute.

The Vauxhall Nova in England had to be the Corsa in Spain as No Va apparently means "Doesn't Go" in some Spanish Dialects!

haha, translations are so funny

i had to help someone in my class today fix his laptop. his laptop is in Chinese and he cant speak English, so we had to communicate using Google translate

We drive some funny named cars here in Croatia:
Ford Kuga (kuga = plague)
WV Sharan (Sharan = Carp fish)
Skoda (damage, sort of)
Kia Shuma (shuma - forest)

Then there's the age-old dilemma: