this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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The double meaning is the entire point of the shitpost?
And 'I came' tends to be the commonly used translation because it is less syllables, matching the cadence of the Latin version more closely, and feels more concise due to that fact.
I do understand it's the entire point.
It's also super annoying when English-speaker make new "languages" which are just English with each word substituted by another. The joke assumes that Latin is just a dialect of English.
So, what I'm trying to hint in a subtle manner between the lines is that the joke is not among the best ones out there. Of course you can go to some meta levels and find something funny about someone being so stupid that they assume that words have 100 % equal meanings across languages. But, meh.
The joke reeks of monolingual ignorance miles away.
We make these kinds of jokes with every language pairing. But you're in an English language community. Of course you're going to be seeing English jokes.
Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.
But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say "count the ticket, it's hundreding" in the meaning "lower the flag, it's raining" (based on the Finnish word "laskea" meaning both "count" and "to lower", "lippu" meaning both "ticket" and "flag" and "sataa" being both the partitive form of "hundred" and "it rains", the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.
And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word "come"? It's not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn't be based on the laughee being ignorant.
What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:
I don't understand what you're trying to say by giving me an example of a joke in Finnish.
Part of what makes jokes funny is the unexpected nature of it, and the first interpretation you typically think of is the literal translation. It would just sound like someone legitimately trying to communicate while mixing up their languages.
The point is that the joke as done by the OP makes no sense outside the English language, just as jokes in other languages based on there being words with multiple meanings or similar sounding words with different meanings in that language, make no sense outside that language.
That joke doesn't at all work in "Latin", it only works when translated back to English because "to come" has two different meanings.
It would never work in Latin.
Right, as is the case for any word play. You need to know the languages involved to understand them. What I don't understand is why they think this is a problem.
Personally, given that I speak a couple of languages, using Latin there just feels forced: suggesting "I came, I saw, I came" as a name for a stripclub or whorehouse is itself the actual funny part and putting it like that instead of in Latin makes it click much faster and for more people (as they don't actually need to know that Veni in Latin is "came").
The language in there only really serves the purpose of showing that the person making it is well educated and know that phrase in its original Latin, which whilst totally valid doesn't make it any more funny, maybe even takes away a bit of it's impact as a joke.
In my own experience the best multiple language jokes play on double entendres in the more unusual language or both languages, or in how people use expressions in their own language without thinking about individual words, but those expressions in literal form are sometimes hilarious (think about "I need to pick your brains" ... and now add a Zombie Apocalypse context) - for example you can wordplay with the hilarious the Dutch expression for "wasting time in details" which is "mieren neuken" (literally "fucking ants") by totally out of the blue talking about "insect shagging" in English to a Dutch audience in the context of time being wasted (also if it's a meeting with people who don't know Dutch, their face when the rest goes "oh shit!" and they totally don't get wtf is going on makes it extra funny).
That said, those tend to be pretty exclusive jokes in that only a few people get it because they need to know both languages, which is especially hard when neither of the languages is English.