Which words are you favorites? You know you have a few … ones that you just like how they sound or feel … words that make you giggle, snicker, or feel all smart? It’s Friday, let’s get ridiculous.
I’ll throw out a few of mine just for kicks, but really, I’d like to hear yours so get busy in the comments, folks!
English
Preposterous. It’s one of those words that sounds a bit like what it means so you can say it with surprise or disdain, or even with an eye roll. It means absurd, ridiculous, or making little sense. As in, “the thought of Mary’s mother stripping in Vegas is preposterous!” Also, it kind of brings to mind the fictional French detective Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, or even better, Maggie Smith in her role as Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey.
Then there are words that I just like the sound of like discombobulated. In psychology I think they talk a lot about being congruent, so kind of behaving how you’re feeling. To me, discombobulated sounds like a freakin’ wreck and that’s exactly what it means and feels like.
Italian
The there’s a handful of words in Italian that I think are hilarious because they’re so over-the-top for what they actually mean in English. (If a word has a hyperlink, give it a click to get to Google Translate, and then click on the sound icon. Then imagine a less robot-like voice and more of a dramatic foreign reading.)
Pipistrello. Go ahead say it just like is sounds pee-pee-stre-lo… and make sure you emphasize that double “L” (not in the Spanish way where it becomes a “ya” sound). Take a while guess what it means. Just throw out any old word for kicks. It sounds adorable right? Now, are you ready? It means bat – the little guys that fly around at night. Ridiculous, right? A whole bunch of letters and syllables and sing song nonsense just to say bat. And to be fair, Spanish isn’t a whole better with this. They call is a murciélago, which I also love. And it sounds a lot more like you think a bat might…
Francobollo. Any guesses? Sounds like it could be exciting, right? Yeah, well, you can get one at the post office for like 44 cents so it’s really not all that thrilling. It’s a stamp.
Chiacchierare (key-yok-key-ya-ray). In English we win the succinct award. For us this word simply means to chat—even though what it means feels like it deserves a lot more letters! We can have a chat with someone or we can call someone chatty. In Spanish, it’s also pretty simple—charlar (where you say the ch just like Charlie) means to chat. Una charla is a chat. If you want to call a dude a chatterbox they’re a charlón, while a girl is a charlona. Italians, win the Romance Language award for using the most letters (in the category of Germanic Languages, I imagine German could take out Italian at the knees). Chiacchierare is to chat. To have oneself a chat is “farsi un a chiacchierata” and if you ever want to call someone chatty, they are a chiacchierone.
Portuguese
OK, now I’ve got another word in Portuguese that I think is mildly hilarious just because of the way it sounds. What it means in English is a somewhat complicated word, so it’s not the contrast that gets me so much as the word itself. In English, we’re talking about the word cobblestones. It’s kind of an odd word in English supposedly dating back to the 15th century, so it’s not that strange that it’s equally odd in Portuguese. It’s paralelepípidos. Yeah, that’s a mouthful… it’s like your tongue is trying to dance a polka on steroids.
French
On to French. If I knew French better, I’d probably have a hundred of these because I swear to God French is/sounds so odd sometimes. The one that gets me is one my mom taught me because she too thought it was petty ridiculous. though is pretty simple. It’s just the word for armchair. I know, how exciting could that possibly be? Well, let me just tell you that it’s the opposite of saying lazyboy in English. You need to do mouth gymnastics to say it and those acrobatics cause you to make some utterly ridiculous faces. In French the word is fauteuil. And if you stick yourself a “roulant” on the end, you get a wheelchair. Fauteuil’s equally ridiculous cousin is feuille. This poor word simply means leaf. But again, you have to basically smell steaming hot shit to say it correctly.
Spanish
If we pop on over to Spanish real quick, the only way you’d ever really know this word is if you sat staring at the banner of the Spanish alphabet posted over the chalkboard in 7th grade. It came complete with pictures so that you could associate the letter “b” with banana just like you do in English. Or, if you went to the zoo in Spain or South America, you might find it there. If you’ve lived and breathed on planet earth, you’ve probably seen the word “baño.” Yeah, it means bathroom. That n with the dopey swirl on top is an entirely separate letter in the Spanish language. It comes directly after the letter “n” that we know and love in English and Spanish, which makes this section of the Spanish alphabet read: l-m-n-ñ-o-p. So, I don’t have any idea what the other pictures on that banner were, but ñ’s drawing looked an ostrich. The word in Spanish is super festive with all its diacritical marks: ñandú. Yeah, you can’t help but think, ¡Olé! And… what I didn’t know until just now is that while a ñandú is a flightless bird, it’s actually not even an ostrich (which is a weird enough word in English to begin with)! It’s called a rhea. Well, this meant I had to look up how you actually say ostrich in Spanish because I’ve been wrong about that since the age of 12.
It too now may just be on my list of ridiculous words. It’s called an avestruz. God forbid you need to talk about more than one, now you’ve got a bunch of avestruces running around. Ave means bird in Spanish so that’s not too strange, but what the hell is a struz?? It reminds me a bad word in Italian, stronzo, which would make it an asshole bird. Sorry, rheas… but there was that HuffPo article a while back and the title was “Escaped Giant Rhea Bird Can Disembowel A Human With One Strike”… so maybe it is kind of a stronzo… ?
Be quiet, asshole!
This is my kitty dressed up as a bat, isn’t he scary?
Two big talkers never travel far together.
An ostrich… in flight? (My caption)
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Note: The main blog pic was taken by Ramón Moller Jensen and can be found here: https://edu.glogster.com/glog/the-greater-rhea/24ggeru37is?=glogpedia-source.