Ill start:
“Me cago en tus muertos” - ill shit all over your dead relatives. Spanish.
My personal favourites from Finnish.
“Ei ole kaikki muumit Muumilaaksossa” “Not having all the Moomins in Moomin Valley” Used for people who are either stupid or lack sanity. There are other variants of this and Moomin one is not older than a couple of decades.
I find our version of Grammar Nazi pretty great. We call them comma fuckers.
“Ei voi kauhalla ottaa jos on lusikalla annettu” “You can’t take with a ladle if it was given with a spoon”. This refers also to a lack of something, usually a lack of intelligence or sense.
“Not having all the Moomins in Moomin Valley”
That’s totally something we’ll use. Thanks :D Also I’m stealing that. I’m stealing that insult and Americanizing it and you can’t stop me
Just be warned Moomins are a gateway to communism (Weird internet theory). Or at least to more Moomins. We literally have Moomin everything here.
In Denmark you have:
- Paragraph Knight - someone who cares too much about rules and regulations.
- Fly Fucker - someone who cares too much about something deeply insignificant.
In German there is “Paragraphenreiter” - Paragraph rider.
German: “Du Lappen”
Translates to “You rag”, pretty much calling someone a loser or idiot.
Du hast doch nicht alle Tassen im Schrank - German, you don’t have all your cups in the drawer.
Telling someone he is stupid via comparison to cups. Why? Who knows.
Storing cups in drawers, huh.
“Schrank” is not really a drawer. Translating it as “cupboard” would be more appropriate, I think.
Ah, maybe. My vocabulary for kitchen furniture is a bit unclear sometimes what equates to what.
Schrank would be a box with doors and several levels of storage inside.
Reminds me of ones like “You’re one fry short of a Happy Meal”, or “You’ve lost some marbles”. They generally imply that you’ve lost or are missing some mental faculties.
It’s like saying somebody is not the sharpest tool in the shed.
My favorite way to say that somebody is stupid is to say “Er ist dumm wie drei Meter Feldweg”, translates to “he’s as dumb as three meters (a bit more than 9 yards) of dirt road”.
كول هوا
“Kawl hawa”
Literally “eat air” in Arabic
Means shut up
Oh that is fantastic. I need to use that one.
That’s hilarious
In polish, calling people with the neutral gender. It’s a grave insult which implies lack of agency and dehumanisation, and thank to some rightwinger assholes in parliament is also a specific transphobic insult now.
While in english it’s completely normal thing to say if you’re not sure of a person’s gender.
So definitely not my “favourite”, i would never said this to anyone in polish and i occasionally get a hiccup of misgendering someone in english because of that, but interesting from language point of view.
Is it kind of like calling someone “it” as an insult in English?
Pretty much yes, the closest thing that would be.
I’d say so, and I’ve seen it used in the same transphobic contexts.
This seems like a thing in Slavic languages in general. In Russian the equivalent is “одушевленные и неодушевленные существительные” - animate, and inanimate objects, so I guess they add one extra pronoun to the usual three, which is just for objects. I think some genderqueer people prefer using the plural pronoun in that case (“они” instead of “оно”). Is that possible in Polish?
The neutral gender is perfectly grammatical in polish, just it was never used for people other than small babies, i seen some effort to use it in literature for gender fluid or genderless people but it’s rare and don’t get positive reviews. It might catch some day though, i don’t know.
In polish, calling people with the neutral gender…While in english it’s completely normal thing to say if you’re not sure of a person’s gender.
Maybe I misunderstand, but you should never call someone “it” in English, except for animals and babies. Calling someone “it” is considered dehumanizing in English.
Yes, what i meant that in english you call people in 3rd person “them”, “they” regardless of their gender, but in polish neutral gender would always be “it”. That’s why it’s so insulting to use it despite it is gramatically existing. Polish had pronouns literally build in every noun, verb and adjective.
In Quebec French, people sometimes say of someone who’s not particularly bright:
“His mom rocked him/her too close to the wall.”
It’s just so… vivid and random.
A strong insult in french would be to tell that someone has been “fini à la pisse”.
I don’t know how to translate that but it would means that their dad did not have enough sperm so he used urine to conceive them.
Oh cool, we have a very similar one in German: “His/her swing stood too close to the wall.”
German Korinthenkacker (currant shitter) is someone who tries to win an argument by looking at unimportant details.
Not my native language but the German language has some pretty fantastic words/insults like “punchable face” (backpfeifengesicht) and “brain denier” (gehirnverweigerer).
Also Knödelfriedhof (dumpling graveyard) for obese people is kind of funny I think.
I hadn’t heard that one before but your opinion is objectively wrong: It’s not “kind of funny”, it’s hilarious.
People got banned from Reddit for less.
I caught a ban from reddit for pointing out that COVID 19 could kill you. This was during the height of the pandemic too.
People caught bans for some spectacularly stupid stuff on reddit and their reporting system is straight up broken, so plenty of bad shit goes ignored indefinitely.
“Dich soll der Blitz beim Scheißen treffen!”
May lightning strike you while you shit. One of my personal favourites.
The disapproving and insulted look of a Canadian when you’ve done something so stupid that they can’t even apologize for it.
It’s when there’s no apology or jokes, just the look, that you know you’ve become the stupidest fucker north of these here prairies and bears ya know.
Calling a male a “nephew” in Chinese 契弟 kai dai is calling them a male prostitute.
Usually it doesn’t mean target male has actually been used sexually, but commonly used for general belittlement.
This term comes from ancient times: Traveling businessmen who would take a young boy with them for sexual use, but if anyone on the road or destination asked who the boy was, the business man would euphemistically explain “He’s my nephew”
契弟 kai dai is commonly translated as “nephew” but it means “adopted brother”
In Bulgaria we have the very creative insult „You’re as sharp as an edge on a round table”, which I find pretty amusing
Cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, a caricature of an American southern gentleman, comes pretty close when he describes another character as “about as sharp as a bowling ball”
Wow so much lost in translation. I grew up with dubbed looney tunes, never knew he was supposed to be a gentleman let alone that it had a regional flavour. For me it was just a quirky rooster.
In French, “pisse-vinaigre” or vinegar pisser, for someone that complains about everything
Same in Dutch: azijnzeiker (azijn = vinegar, zeiker = pisser). So that one does translate well (but not to English :))
Neat! In Dutch we have azijnpisser/azijnzeiker which means the exact same thing.
In Tamil: சோத்துல உப்பு போட்டு தான தின்ற?
Translation: Don’t you add salt to your food?
Context: This is when somebody doesn’t react/listen/change no matter how much they are insulted. The other party asks if they add salt to their food, or if they only eat bland food, and thus have lost all emotions and have become as bland as their food.
It’s a bit difficult to explain, but the general belief is that food reflects your emotions and reactance and moods. Bland food - emotionless, spicy food - easy to anger, etc.
Argentinian here, I find very funny that a while ago somebody decided to express frustration saying la concha del pato or la concha del mono (lit. “vagina of the male duck” or “monkey”). Yes, the absurdity of a male animal with a female organ seems to reinforce the obscenity somehow.
Nunca escuché la del pato. De qué parte de Argentina?
“Κλάσε μου τα αρχίδια” which literally stands for “fart my balls” in Greek.
It’s a way of telling someone to go fuck himself.
Which can also be lovely further embellished such as “πάρε φορά και κλάσε μου τ’αρχιδια” (“take momentum and fart my testicles”) or “θα μου κλάσεις μια μάντρα αρχίδια” (“You’ll fart me a yard of testicles”, usually utilized as a defiant answer to a physical threat)
