this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Yeah, it should be translated to Bearable and Unbearable.
Bare and barenaked
Just wait until they realize we named everything in space after milk.
"And your sun system is located in the milky milk?"
Our Sun is a Sun, not THE sun but The Sun
Not everything
... But yeah, a crazy number of things relate to dairy.
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Took me too long to remember “Arctic” and “Antarctic” and I kept wondering how “North Pole / South Pole” translated to “Bearlandia / NoBearlandia”
In Chinese (I mean like most dialects), North Pole is just 北极 ("Northern Extreme"), South Pole is 南极 ("Southern Extreme"). Arctic is just 北极 with the extra character 地区 meaning area ("Northern Extreme Area"), Antartica is 南极洲 ("Southern Extreme Continent").
There's no weird etymology involving bears lol
Maybe we should let someone from China or Taiwan contact the aliens?
Someone once told me that the Chinese word for penguin translated to "business goose" and I cannot tell you how crestfallen I was when I looked it up and found out it wasn't true.
I mean "企" character by itself isn't really a word, but maybe the person thought of 企业 (Enterprise/Bussiness), which I would say technically that person isn't like lying, just a misunderstanding of language.
But then again, I've only attended primary school grade-levels in China, so I'm no word expert either.
Penguins are called 企鵝/企鹅 (qì'é, [tɕʰi˥˩ ɤ˧˥]) in Chinese. It would be better literally translated as standing goose. It just so happens to share the same character 企 with the word for business. Most people don't know that 企 means standing anymore though.
Read Three Body Problem if you wanna know how that goes
Tbf she was an alien-worshipping cultist (cult wasn't technically founded at the time, but she had the mindset of a cultist)
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Just wait until they hear about Virginland.
Gonna need you to be more specific about that. We have a lot of virginlands in the Americas
Wyoming
Fun fact, Wyoming gets it's name from the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania, and is a Delaware word for "big plain" in reference ti a river's flood plain.
They're actually called penguinland and no-penguinland
...didn't i just see something about ursus arctos arctos?...
It's common courtesy to tell others of bear sightings.
Yup. There was a meme about some bear (the european brown bear, maybe?) that was more bear than other bears, because it's latin name (as you pointed out) is literally bear bear bear.
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TIL what "Arctic" means.
I love the bear monkeys
Nah, isn't it more Towardsbearland and Awayfrombearland?
Arktos means bear in Ancient Greek and the name Arctic comes from Arktikos which could be translated as near the bear. One theory is that it was named because of the Ursa constellations (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor). Antarctica just means opposite of the Arctic.
The scientific name for Brown Bears is Ursus Arctos. Ursus means bear in Latin while Arctos means bear in Ancient Greek so their name translated is Bear Bear.
And then there's the grizzly bear, ursus arctos horribilis, horrible bear bear. My favourite part is that 'horribilis' is a mistranslation from English into Latin; 'grisly' is synonymous with 'horrible', but 'grizzly' actually means 'greyish'
Edit: Ursus arctos griseus or Ursus arctos canescens would be the most likely names of it had been translated correctly (grey bear bear and greying (with age) bear bear, respectively)
If it comes from the constellations, we got pretty fucking lucky
bears and unbears
Yep. It's Towards-bear-land, and Against-towards-bear-land.
IMO, nobody every made it clear if it's (against-towards)-bear-land, what would be away-from-bear-land, or against-(towards-bear-land).
This joke would be rather hard to translate to my language because we use the same word for dirt (as in, 'soil' - in fact, in certain cases for actual soil, as well) as for Earth. Or ground.
We only have a separate word for the unclean meaning of dirt, or a compound word containing dirt to denote soil.
I can easily imagine this as an actual attempt from a beginner English speaker from home.
But Antarctica doesn’t derive from “not Arctic”, but from ‘opposite of Arctic’. The bear part is right, though.
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A bit disappointed this isn't about the funny YouTube song about the Dirt Man
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