I had dinner tonight with a friend of mine. I kid you not, his French cousin was visiting. During the meal, I asked her to pass me a metal pan filled with bread. My exact words were, “Could you please pass me that pan of pain?” , only it sounded like I said “Pan of Pan”, since the French word for yeasty wheat product, “pain”, is pronounced “pan”. I got a small smile from that.
Ow! Stop throwing rocks at me! I said this thread would contain Puns in the title, so quit it!
Anyway, does anyone have an example of a pun (or something else) they made, or heard, involving more more than one language?
P.S. I would use the word “bilingual”, in my tale, but I ain’t. I just know a few words.
P.S.S. I know that there was an older thread about this topic, but it is never a good idea to search for threads involving four-letter words, such as “puns”.
Stupid bakas! I could have sworn I put “bilingual” in the thread title. The camels must have eaten it. (I hear tell camels fill in for the hamsters, late at night. They get plenty of wheel turning power, but it’s hell trying to get them into those lil’ wheel.
Incidentally, “baka" translates into “Idiot” in Japanese, but “young camel” in Arabic, or at least, that is what I am told.
I don’t know whether this is a joke, or actually true. I’ve been told that the motto of the French marines is “To the water, it is the time” or in French “A l’eau c’est l’heure”
which sounds like “allo sailor”
Heh. Not really a pun, but I like to bow deeply to my little brother and call him “baka-sama”.
Here are a couple with Jaopanese:
In Arlington, Mass. there’s a Japanese restaurant that sells stuffed buns of various kinds. It’s called Ichi Bun.
They had an anime conventrion somewhere and, for the first one, used a Japanese radish as the symbol, because they called the convention Dai-Con.
(Daikon = a Japanese vegetable, sometime called a Japanese radish. “___-Con” is a common short designation for some kind of convention, usualy involving a pun. “Dai-” suggests “Dai-Ichi”, meaning “Number One”, implying this is the very best Con of this kind. Also it was the first one they held. And now you know why people hate to explain jokes. Figure out “Ichi Bun” on your own.)
For pure hilarity, not much tops legendary French crooner/poet/bad boy/drunk Serge Gainsbourg telling Whitney Houston on French television that he wants to fuck her. Happened about twenty years ago, while Gainsbourg was still (barely) alive and terminally soused. Both he and Whitney appeared on a talk show (Michel Drucker?) and Serge, testing out his lousy English, clearly told Whitney that he wanted to fuck her. She was stunned, the host tried a lame joke about Serge wanting to offer her flowers, Serge screamed at him, Whitney looked for an exit, etc.
I bring this up now because it always reminds me of the trouble caused by the French noun baiser (a kiss) and the French verb baiser (usually, but not exclusively, to fuck). English speakers who are learning French often get the two mixed up, and instead of saying, for example, “I want to give you a kiss” (Je veux te donner un baiser), they wind up saying “I want to fuck you” (Je veux te baiser). (Baiser is one hell of a word, especially since the verb can mean to kiss (in fact, that’s its primary meaning in the Little Bob), and it depends on the context and the style you employ when using it, there are other verbs for “to kiss” that should probably be used given the moment and the person, and…blah, blah, blah. A word best avoided, if you ask me, unless you want to scream that you were had: “Il m’a baisé !” “He fucked me! He robbed me blind!” Or, in Quebec, “Y m’a baisé ben raide dans l’cul, stie ! He fucked me up the ass, sonofabitch!”
After the Whitney episode, several of Serge Gainsbourg’s supporters claimed that he’d suffered a similar confusion, and had merely wanted to give Whitney a kiss (she’d just sung one of her lung-poppers, and looked fresh and young in those days – Serge always had an eye for the ladies). Gainsbourg always maintained that he’d meant what he said, and the whole incident became a much-beloved moment in his long, grotesque history.