With the Norwegian government recently deciding to massively increase the US military presence in this country, I just really want to have some derogatory way of referring to Usonians in the Norwegian language. The problem is that I cannot find any good word for this: existing words fall short; foreign words I'm familiar with either don't translate well, or don't sound good when loaned, or aren't easily understood; and I'm having a hard time coming up with a brand new word to fill this gap myself.
I'm hoping that by asking here that I might be able to find some inspiration, or perhaps even be enlightened about a Norwegian-language term that I didn't know before.
if you can find a word that sounds like and signifies "trash", it could be good. simple insults are good. "Yankee trash" etc. in the US being called "trash" (not garbage) is ainsult that catches people off guard (because it's not a cussword or gross) and plays into the ideology of certain people/families having a "culture of poverty" that makes them unable to rise in the totally-not-fake meritocracy. growing up, it's a scold families might use in private to sanction against styles of dress or poor manners. "don't be trash/trashy".
of course some people say it to friends in familiarity, but among strangers it would be... not good. I saw two middle aged women in a grocery store parking lot threaten to murder each other with it last winter.
it's kind of funny, in dialectal Norwegian the word "boss" means "trash/garbage" but it's identical to the word "boss" as in one's boss or the boss in a video game.
People also do just straight up use the English word "trash" sometimes...
As an American who has always called my supervisor boss, I love this.
This works for toki pona: ma jaki means "trash land" or "gross land" or "the land of trash".
Also kinda sounds like yanqui too so double points.
sina jan pi toki pona‽
tenpo ni la mi kama sona e ni! mi kama sona kepeken sitelen tawa lon youtube. tenpo kama lili la, sitelen tawa li pini tawa mi
mi sona ala e ni: lon ni li jan pi toki pona. lemmygrad li jo e kulupu pi toki pona, taso mi kepeken ala e ni lon tenpo ni.
mi mute o pali e sitelen musi pi jan pali lon ni.
mi sona ala e ni
It means: "I didn't know there are toki ponists here. We should make toki pona worker/communist memes here."
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh now it seems obvious that that's the meaning
No probs! Its kinda funny to me that toki pona works best in person, because you have some situational context, yet its mostly used online and we have to figure out whether "ilo toki" means computer, phone, chat program, etc in a text box with zero context.
Yeah, situational context, and just as importantly gestures and gesticulation and intonation, right? Alas, if it were possible in These Material Conditions, I would absolutely try joining that VRchat community for Toki Pona that I've heard about... Or for that matter, some sort of in-person Toki Pona group might be preferable in some ways.
That said my TP is very poor, and I am certainly less diligent and far on the path than you, so getting confused was really just because of that rather than the sentences themselves necessarily being ambiguous.
In a sense it's kind of like acronyms or initialisms, isn't it? The number of possible two-word combinations in Toki Pona and the number of possible one-to-three letter initialisms using the English alphabet are pretty close.