Most of the people I'm dealing with at this point are at least bilingual, and remarkably many even multilingual. Besides enabling you to spice up conversations, it often makes for some unexpected amusement. Many of the students seem nearly fluent with English, but all the other languages bring their own condiments to the communication soup. I know I tend to get German and Swedish words all mixed up, but it's especially funny when some of these influences sneak into our English. Yesterday saw a little bit of such comedy.
After the lessons at Háskóli I was walking just somewhere with a couple of friends, a Finn and a Swede. During the class it had started raining, not very heavily, but none of us seemed to have equipped ourselves against rainfall. The fellow Finn had probably the worst clothing choice of us, wearing a soft cotton jacket. She wailed "Argh, why didn't I take my parachute with me?" It took probably half a second for us others to burst into laughter, and half a second more for her to do the same. We traced very quickly where that word came to her mind, as one of the Swedish words for umbrella is paraply. Nonetheless, we kept bombarding her with all the parachute and umbrella related jokes we just could come up with, and we were rather resourceful. Probably to a point where she just wanted to kick our teeth in.
Even after crossing that border we suggested that Hallgrimskirkja would probably be a great base jump location.
I adore such moments of random silliness. On my way home from the pools I for some reason remembered the Finnish actor-author Reidar Palmgren. Now when I'm using English more, I also tend to look at Finnish a little differently, so I quickly discovered which English word the name resembles. Since I'm an avid supporter of idiocy and complete nonsense, I had to spend a few moments materializing some of the similar oddities I've recently been shaping in my mind. An Unfunny Alert needs to be issued though, since the following is not particularily skillful and you probably won't find the following very amusing if you are
A) not me AND/OR
B) on something.
I'm sorry.
I still got a few chuckles when I was creating it. I probably should start writing bad haikus again too. Nonsense just has too much potential.
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weird... I wrote about this same subject yesterday too.
oh, and til hamingju með afmælið!
You actually beat me to it.
I had written the languages part of my entry as a draft before I saw yours, yet I felt like a copycat pressing Publish.
But takk fyrir anyway! One of my classmates at Conversational practice this morning kind of slipped it for everyone to hear, so I got sung "Happy Birthday" in Icelandic. It was a fun way to start the day.
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