This is so fucking funny
For non Irish speakers when translated it says “make a movie about black people they said” but in Irish putting a colour modifier when talking about a person/group of people it has a cultural meaning, some colours even have different words when talking about hair colour (like red). So in that vein, the word black (‘dubh’ pronounced ‘duv’) is associated with the devil and/or evil things and naturally it’s quite rude to describe someone as black in Irish so we call black people ’gorm’ (pronounced gurrum) which is actually blue. Frequently people claiming Irish heritage mess this up, most notably and hilariously is that cop who tried to make a ‘blue lives matter’ t-shirt and messed up every word single word in the translation except for the ‘blue’ modifier which made his stupid t-shirt actually say ‘black lives matter’.
All that to say that it translates as “make a movie about black people, they said” but directly translated it says “make a movie about blue people, they said”.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk
Give me more jokes requiring deep cultural knowledge!
OK, so in Irish there’s an old saying “Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin” (it sort of sounds like: ‘kneel ain tin-tawn mar duh tin-tawn fain’). It translates as “there’s no fireplace like your own fireplace”, as in ‘there’s no place like home’.
However the word for fireplace, thinteán (tin-tawn), is very similar in pronunciation to the words tinn tón (teen tone) and they sometimes get swapped out for comedic value or to low key make fun of someone complaining.
See, tinn tón means sore butt.
Which changes it from ’there’s no fireplace like your own fireplace’, a nice, relatable phrase that old people would smile at and agree with you about, to ‘there’s no sore arse like your own sore arse’, which, when deployed correctly, can be either a solemn commiseration with how it’s difficult for people to understand the deeper levels of the pain a person is feeling (you would have said it to the person who’s suffering in a sort of ‘here’s a silly joke to make you smile but also show I understand how little I understand of your pain. Plus we’re Irish and find it hard to show emotion without slagging so I’m pretending to make fun of you complaining but, really, we both know that the fact that I’m doing it in this way shows I care a lot), OR a jab at someone who’s going on and on complaining about some minor shit and you say it quietly to someone beside you who’s also been listening to this gobshite prattering on in the hopes that you can make them burst out laughing.
[ID: A screenshot from the movie Avatar containing two Na'vi people, who have blue skin. It is captioned with the Irish words “Scannán faoi dhaoine gorma / dúirt siad”. End ID]
(ID by @whatuegg)
