UPDATE: A very nice Finnish person explained this to me (Thank you, M!). The Finnish verb for "to rob" is "ryöstää," which is very close to the verb "ryystää." So it is a play on words. This is robbery (the cost is so cheap?) and this is slurp (what else do you do with a shake?). And now I know enough so that I don't use this phrase in public unless in line at McDonald's, and probably not even then.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
This is slurped?
Figuring out something new in a different language is fun
and sometimes challenging. I have never had trouble before with French, German,
Spanish, Latin, and even Greek. But Finnish is especially "fun" and
"challenging." I am encountering too many words that seem to defy
translation, but these words are used in everyday situations, so their meaning must
be known to the five million or so speakers of Finnish. Google is great and all
that (although read my post "A slap in the face for .99 euros"), but
I also know very well how to use a dictionary, and I have several
Suomi/Englanti dictionaries. So when I saw a seemingly simple phrase on a
McDonald's poster advertising a strawberry shake, I assumed I could
translate it: Tämä on ryystö. I already knew the "Tämä on" part, which
is easy: This is. I was happy I could learn a new, common word that I could use
with "This is" and impress everyone with my McDonald's street talk: Anteeksi,
tämä on ryystö! But this is what? "Ryystö" was not the word for
"shake" (that word is "pirtelö," and it is on the poster). So
I figured the word must be an adjective that was informal (slang) for something
like "great" or "tasty." Well, I spent way too much time (that's
to say, more than five minutes) trying to discover the meaning of this word. Google
Translate informed me that "Tämä on ryystö" means "This is ryystö,"
which I can't deny, but I know there must be some real meaning behind that
word. The word sort of looked like the verb "ryystää," which means
"to slurp," but it was not a conjugated form of the verb like you
could expect (This is slurped?) because I checked: http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/Finnish/ryyst%C3%A4%C3%A4.html.
Is it a variant (This is slurpilicious)? At least I learned a few more words
trying to figure out this one, and "ryystö" is now on my list of
words to ask a native speaker. The list is growing.
UPDATE: A very nice Finnish person explained this to me (Thank you, M!). The Finnish verb for "to rob" is "ryöstää," which is very close to the verb "ryystää." So it is a play on words. This is robbery (the cost is so cheap?) and this is slurp (what else do you do with a shake?). And now I know enough so that I don't use this phrase in public unless in line at McDonald's, and probably not even then.
UPDATE: A very nice Finnish person explained this to me (Thank you, M!). The Finnish verb for "to rob" is "ryöstää," which is very close to the verb "ryystää." So it is a play on words. This is robbery (the cost is so cheap?) and this is slurp (what else do you do with a shake?). And now I know enough so that I don't use this phrase in public unless in line at McDonald's, and probably not even then.
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