A bit of background for you. The below musings came to me after a night out on the lash. What was so special about this night on tiles to warrant me writing something down? I'll give you a multiple choice quiz and you can guess what about said night was so special:
Question
What was so special about Huw's night out?
Answers
(a) None of the above.
(b) He'd consumed so much Absinthe that the worm root caused him to hallucinate a conversation with Wordsworth, Geoffry Chaucer, Oscar Wilde and Will Smith the topic of which he later captured in an experimental blog post.
(c) Nothing. There was no night. This whole thing is just an excuse to write an introduction to what would otherwise appear to be an irrelevant and unrelated story.
(d) 42
(e) I grew concerned after a night out overseas with a bunch backpackers none of whose first language was English and my usual charms and wit went down like Hitler at a bar mitzvah.
(f) All of the above.
(g) Other...please comment in space provided below.
If you guessed (c) you would be totally wrong. Dumb ass. If you selected (g) Other and wrote something along the lines "you are a total douche avec bag, I can't believe I'm reading this, but like Kanye West I'm gonna finish reading your blog post, but Daniel Murray like totally had the best first blog post of all time!" then you would be correct in your assessment of me and Murray but wrong in relation to the question at hand. Dumb ass.
To find the actual answer read the post below and all shall be revealed.
Slang – the trouble with foreigners
The English language is well known to be, at times, obtuse and confusing. From the well known homophones such as “to, too, two” or “there, their, they’re” and homonyms such as bow. Beau the bow legged man stood on the bow with his bow resting across his back while he tied a bow in his hair in preparation for the bow he would deliver. Good luck to Adolf my German freund reading that. Without context you would be at sixes and sevens.
This brings me to the phrase of the day, “Ruben Wiki”. Can I have that in a sentence spelling bee style it could read something like “Daniel chucked a Ruben Wiki”. By now I’m sure some of you have guessed what a Ruben Wiki is. Ruben Wiki is a former Rugby League player. Daniel is strong man, like Stalin, who is capable of throwing large men. Of course, in this context, Ruben Wiki is the unholy marriage of traditional British rhyming slang and lazy Australian vernacular. You can imagine the chaos this brings to old mate Klaus. It’s like a grammatical version of a Mr Squiggle puzzle where you have to turn a seemingly random collection of words into a comprehensible phrase.
To make it easy on Franz let’s break it down to its component parts. Ruben Wiki, the former Rugby League player of minor repute, rhymes with Sickie, the slang term for taking a day off work under the false pretence that one is sick but in fact more likely to be found at the beach with a pie and chocolate milk in hand. With Sickie being a noun (of the abstract variety, remember this as it will become important before this paragraph is out) it thus requires a verb and subject to make a complete sentence in the context we desire. Enter Daniel, the subject. What does Daniel do with this Ruben Wiki? Daniel thinks about it. Daniel decides to chuck it. Oh dear. More confusion for Dieter. How can Daniel chuck or throw something that he cannot touch? I really don’t know the answer here so I will speculate wildly. I think it may have something to do with the fact that a when taking a sickie you have to sound convincing. It’s like acting. You are pretending. You really need to throw yourself into the performance to sound convincing. That may sound tenuous but it’s what I’m going with.
To the advanced user of the English language you can further confuse Jürgen by shortening the whole phrase or mixing it with other verbs. For instance one could “take a ruben” or “have a sly wiki”. For poor old Hans this is starting to look like the Von Schlieffen plan. A complex military manoeuvre that will ultimately end in failure.
So the moral of the story is simple. Don’t use too much slang at the hostel pub crawl when trying to chat up the hot German backpackers.
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