Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Chapter 10, Page 18 Misunderstanding

A reference to Calvin And Hobbs. You should read it.

Mary is referencing Calvin and Hobbs here. For those of you who know Yiddish you may be able to guess what word Mary found.

I feel for Mom sometimes. She's the one sane person in the house more often than not.

10 comments:

Dan (AKA Croatoan5376@Yahoo.com) said...

Awwwwwwww. Poor Mary! '^^

And blast my inherent curiosity. Now I gotta track down an online Yiddish-English dictionary in order to...ah, it's on Wiktionary!

Double blast. Now I'm never gonna be able to watch another Billy Crystal or buddy movie again without feeling all uncomfortable and squirmy inside at points. Some words you just don't need to know the literal meaning of (until now I always thought it was something of a dialectic variation on "fool" or "idiot" or "baka". You learn something new every day, I guess. Whether you really wanted to or not)!

Poor Mary!

Brigid said...

@Dan: Yeah, just add two letters to a sound effect and oy.

Humans come up with such, ah, interesting terms for things.

Acacia H. said...

It's always fun swearing in foreign languages. =^-^= And the Germanic languages (and Russian) sound nicely ominous so you can say something simple like "you will be quiet now!" and it sounds like a dire death threat! Sadly, I barely comprehend English, and that's my first (and only) language. ^^;;

Rob H.

Brigid said...

@Robert: Yeah. The Germanic tongues are really cool that way.

Journo-SEAL said...

Um...the word doesn't happen to be "sc***k" does it?

I read about the origin of the word, and apparently the word was "regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo" 0_0

Now I can never watch another Billy Crystal or gangster movie and think the same thing again.

Brigid said...

@Journo: Yep. Funny, you're the second person to mention Billy Crystal. I have no idea who the guy is, but I'm guessing he uses that word a lot.

Journo-SEAL said...

Billy Crystal is an actor. He did the English voice of Calcifer in the anime Howl's Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki.

He's also done the voice of Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc..

He has used the term in a few of his films, I'm not mistaken.

Incidentally, the same word has a completely different meaning in German, although it is not as offensive. It simply means a hack writer.

Brigid said...

@Journo: Ah. I've seen both of those movies, but I was unaware of the names of the voice actors. Which is pretty typical, actually.

And interesting note on the meaning of the word.

Journo-SEAL said...

Kind of like my eldest sister, and me before I started to notice that actors were the people who provided voices in cartoons ^_^

Brigid said...

@Journo: Yeah, though I tend to not know the names of actors in live action shows and movies, too. There are a few I know the names of, but not many and they tend to either be huge names or actors that my parents are fans of.