h a l f b a k e r yBone to the bad.
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I'm listening to my friend Ahmed walking down the street yelling Zachen! Al Tee Zachen! (which he had assumed was a word in Arabic, till he met me and I told him what the meaning was in Yiddish). And throwing away a broken clothespin with brittle plastic dried out by the sun. And thinking... |
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I was not sure at first if you were talking about clothes spins, which I assumed was a word for whirlygig that I didn't know. |
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But now I am thinking you are talking about clothes pegs, but they are usually made from wood not plastic? |
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Did you know that clothes pegs in general are a fairly recent invention, only a couple of centuries old? |
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Halfbaked enough to get my approval…. but we call them clothes pegs. |
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//I'm listening to my friend Ahmed walking down the street yelling Zachen! Al Tee Zachen! (which he had assumed was a word in Arabic, till he met me and I told him what the meaning was in Yiddish).// |
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Yeah, the fool. Google translate tells me that this means "Zachen! Al Tee Zachen!" in Yiddish.
Of course.
So actually Zachen means "conceived" in Bulgarian. |
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//And throwing away a broken clothespin with brittle plastic dried out by the sun.// |
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I'm pretty sure that this plastic can't be recycled just by melting it down. |
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My clothes pins are made of wood. |
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So basically Ahmed was collecting scrap? |
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I think scrap merchants are legally obliged to shout incomprehensibly under international law.
Around here they shout "Annyo eeeern!" Or similar. |
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Clearly, they are collecting expired Enjo products for recycling in Ireland (Erin). |
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I think that's a language called "Hmmpf!" (a word pronounced mostly by exhaling through the nose). |
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//And what language is that (at least your best guess), and what are trying to say?// |
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The language was presumably at one point English, but it has decayed through regular repetition over many years.
They are advertising their ability to take obsolete metal items of arbitrary size off your hands, that is, they will accept "any old iron." |
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//Google Translate//
Originally bilingual French/English ("franglais"), after many years working in multi-lingual environments, when asked, I reply that I am impeccably fluent in Gibberish. |
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//clothes pegs/pins// The only item with the same name in every language of the world is the sugary, tomatoey red sauce popularized by McD's and similar: 'ketchup'*. The spelling can be different, but it is pronounced 'ketchup'; even the Sami, Inuit and Yanomami pronounce it 'ketchup'. |
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*Not 'catsup', which is a whole other animal, and was originally some sort of tamari-type anchovy fish sauce with dates or some crazy thing. No. |
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//the sugary, tomatoey red sauce popularized by McD's and similar// Oh you mean Tomato Sauce? No-one here calls it ketchup. |
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Right [poc], but you know what is meant when 'ketchup' is mentioned, even if you have another 'cultural' word for the same thing, so the observation still stands. |
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