Team Coco
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2019–2024
6:03 · 9.6M views · Jan 23, 2018
Finnish comedian Ismo does a stand-up routine on Conan about the many meanings of the English word 'ass'. He riffs on the confusing quirks of English as a second language.
Mostly posted as a joke or amusing aside in threads about English, language learning, and swearing.
7 comments from Hacker News
The article contains clips of the "Ass" version. For those that want a link to the whole thing: this video
I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries. And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true. I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest. Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this: this video (Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha". Makes me think of Ismo and the word "ass": this video
Lately, my favorite comments about English as a second language come from Finnish comedian Ismo, regarding his take on the most complicated word in the English language: Ass. this video (Reasonably SFW; the set is from a normal TV talk show.)
There's a Finnish stand-up comedian who also pondered on the many possibilities of the English word "ass". This is him on Conan's talk show: this video Funny enough, he mentions the same things the article does, especially the end of it.