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[–] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

That meme is so lame. 92 in Danish is two and a half fives. The 20 part is old-fashioned and literally nobody has used that since the 1800s.

2 and a half fives' twentieth = outdated cringe. 2 and a half fives = actually how it is said today.

It's still a friggin nightmare to get someone's Phone number verbally, though.

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  • [+] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    No, in Danish the "half five" part means the same as "half past 4" on the clock: 4.5.

    Then the part that most people omit nowadays, sindstyvende, means times 20.

    (Half past 4) times 20 = 90.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    That only makes it worse.

    Two and a half fives = 12.5.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    More like 2 and half fives. Half five is our word for 90. So in essence we say 2 and 90 but the word 90 is half five.

    80 is fours

    70 is half fours

    60 is threes

    50 is half threes

    40 is forty

    30 is thirty

    20 is twenty

    10 is ten.

    Oh and a 100 is a hundred. So I dunno what happened between 50 and 90, but I'm sure there is a funny story behind that somewhere.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You're just digging yourself and Denmark into deeper hole. It's fucked up and you know it

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I never claimed otherwise. I'm just tired that this 92 meme is using outdated language (or numbers rather) to make a point that may have been reasonable to make in the 1800s, but not today. Doesn't mean our number system is any less retarded today. If anything, I'm just adding on to the fact that Danes are notoriously lazy with the Danish language and will cut corners with all words and sentences the same way Americans cut corners when they chop everybody's name up into bite sized nicknames. For us, though, it's more like slurring at the end of a word and flat out ignoring letters that are very clearly there in the word.

    Woe is the poor asshole who decides to immigrate here and attempts to learn the cancerous gargle that is our language.

    That said, it is still the best language to curse in and when used in poetry, it can be downright majestic.

    But yeah, our curses are superior to all words in the English language.

    My favourite for life will always be kræftedme = cancer eat me - usually uttered in a sentence to underline how pissed off you are and how serious you are about being pissed off.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    My favourite for life will always be kræftedme = cancer eat me - usually uttered in a sentence to underline how pissed off you are and how serious you are about being pissed off.

    Just curious: do you take that as a reference to cancer as a sickness or actual crabs eating you?

    In German the word for cancer (Krebs) is a homonym referring to both the sickness and a crustacean. So I wondered how this works in Danish.

    (It is in English too, though the reference to crabs is only scientific and thus a very exotic interpretation)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    In Danish cancer is "kræft" while crab is "krabbe" so kræftedme refers to getting eaten by the sickness. Could potentially also refer to strength as kræft/kraft also refer to physical strength, but I'm pretty sure it refers to the sickness.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    More like 2 and half fives.

    Even worse! That would be an indeterminate number that starts at 7 and goes up by 2.5 increments depending on how many half fives there are (since in this version it's not specified, but has to be more than one).

    7, 9.5, 12, 14.5...

    I love this. I thought English had some crazy aspects but this is next level.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Dane here. No one actively thinks of 90 (halvfems, 2 and a half fives) as a mathematical expression. Is is just a word for 90. So we say 2+90 like Germany.

    Would it have been nice if that word meant "9 tens", yes, but Danish is a just a stupid language where you have to learn a bunch of things by heart unfortunately.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    How would you say trump is like Hitler? Do you have to describe the Holocaust in few words within a long ass German style word?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Easy. We often use idioms for comparisons.

    One old way would be: "Trump and Hitler are both 2/3 yards from one piece" which means "They're cut from the same (bad) fabric".

    Fabric was cut in an old measurement"alen" which was 2 foot or 2/3 yards, so simply stating the length would be understood as fabric, similar to how everyone knows that a 2x4s is a piece of wood and such.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Denmark = outdated cringe

    Just kidding neighbor, I love you all

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)