Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

The bee's knees

The other day in class, I noticed a button on a student's backpack with a certain phrase written on it. I can't remember the first word, but the second word was "meininki." I asked my student what it meant and it turns out that "meininki" is one of those words that can't be easily described in English. Nobody in the entire class could come up with an English equivalent, except for one student who hesitantly offered up, "it's like a good time, like 'the bee's knees'?" But he seemed really uncertain about it.

Then someone looked it up on Google Translate, and we all had a good laugh, because this is what Google Translate says "meininki" means:

Which, obviously, no.

Later, Jeremy and I were wondering how this made it into the Google Translate database. Maybe somewhere out there on the internet or in whatever magical corpus Google uses to generate automatic translations, there was a teacher or boss so excited about the new record attendance at the meeting/class that s/he said something about the bee's knees. And that's how this happened. Maybe.

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