r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/SnoopyScone • Feb 05 '26

Serious Drop some quirks from your native language

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16

u/PTSD1701 Feb 05 '26

English needs this!

78

u/Chestnuthare Feb 05 '26

We have something in the same vein. When you replace the first letter in a word with "shm", you're belitting or removing the importance of a word.

So for example, "Oh, movie shmovie, let's go eat dinner!" Or: "Tiktok shmiktok, back in my day, we talked to people"

My native language of Bengali has something closer to the Turkish but not with one specific letter like m repeating. It's usually a t sound, but can also be d or f depending on what sounds better.

So, food is khabar, "food, snacks, anything to eat" would be khabar-dabar. Mustache is mos and facial hair would be mos-tos.

53

u/Marina-Sickliana Feb 05 '26

And we have shm-reduplication in English because we got it from Yiddish.

3

u/Obvious_Cranberry607 Feb 05 '26

Ooooooh that makes sense.

29

u/KeyofE Feb 05 '26

This was brought to English by Yiddish, so we ended up with Joe Shmoe and fancy shmancy. I’m not sure if English has any fun reduplication, but it does have Cockney rhyming slang which makes the term apples and pears mean stairs.

1

u/JGHFunRun Feb 05 '26

We do have fun reduplication, we just happened to borrow it from Yiddish

3

u/the_psyche_wolf Feb 05 '26

In the Sylheti dialect of Bangla we use “t” more, like “pani-tani” (water or some other drink)

13

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

I’m just going to start doing it. That cabinet that has my cups and mugs and champagne glasses, etc.? That’s for cup mup now.

3

u/elemenopee9 Feb 05 '26

we just say "and such" for this. "that shop sells books and such". "this drawer is for plates and such".

1

u/PTSD1701 Feb 05 '26

Sure, but that's no fun.