Cross-linguistic slang.

[sister_luck]

In the recent Year 10 exams I had a student who wrote something along the lines of: "It's wayne what your parents tell you, because teenagers do what they want."

"Huh?", you might say.

Well, it's a simple case of confusing German slang with a genuine English word.

As I'm not really up with what counts as youth slang, I had to have some help to really get behind how Ist mir wayne has come to mean I don't care. Apparently, this is a fairly bad pun mixed in with a variation of a knock knock joke.

It started out as a pun on Wen interessiert's? which became Wayne interessierts? in the online world of boards and chatrooms (note the missing apostrophe which lets you type faster). Of course, only a really bad German accent pronounces those words the same, but it's close enough. This utterance meaning "Who cares?" is sometimes also illustrated by a John Wayne pic for emphasis.

Smartasses , when confronted with something they found utterly pointless, started asking people Ey, kennst du Wayne?, which usually gets answers like Huh? or Wen? and then they can deliver the punchline of Wayne interessierts?

*groans*

This phenomenon is not new - sometimes German expressions are translated literally into English for comedy value, for example Was soll's? - another expression showing that something doesn't matter - is sometimes transformed into What shalls?.

Comments

[comava.livejournal.com]

I rarely associate in the German online world so this is all new to me but I have to say, I find the whole pun on Wen intressierts sort of fun.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I didn't know about the John Wayne connection until today - I only knew wayne as an alternative for egal - I dimly remember that back in the day we just said equal with most of us knowing that it was wrong.

I would never use the expression myself, but it was fun finding out how it has come into being, though of course, this isn't a properly researched post with first citations etc., but that's the sort of thing I leave to the real language bloggers like the good folks at languagelog (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) or the Bremer Sprachblog (http://www.iaas.uni-bremen.de/sprachblog/).

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I prefer the other way around where we translate English expresssions in Dutch: "That person sucks" becomes "Die persoon zuigt". Added comedy value is a bonus.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We do that, too - at least some of us. "Das saugt" or "Das tritt Arsch" are fun expressions.