What are some examples of obfuscation of language to the point of amusement or downright hilarity?

Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions.

Such as, for example, the notorious pseudo-Bislama expression for a piano (Vanuatu: Important Phrases):

Wan bigfala blak bokis hemi gat waet tut mo hemi gat blak tut, sipos yu kilim smol, hemi singaot gud.

Literally; One big fella black box, him he got white tooth and (or more/in addition to) him he got black tooth, suppose you kill him small (strike or hit lightly) him he sing out good.

Yeah… no, as we would say in Australia.

There’s also the obfuscations about obfuscation itself:

Urban Dictionary: Eschew Obfuscation, Espouse Elucidation

“Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the circumscriptional appelations are excised.” (William Mann & Sandra Thompson, Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation, 1987.)

What are the translations and the origins of the names Rawnie and Mackenzie? Is Rawnie only a Roma name?

As a surname, Rawnie turns up very rarely in Lanarkshire, Scotland (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-b…).

As a first name, Rawnie is indeed English Romani, from the Romani rani for ‘lady’ (Message: “Re: Romani names”); it corresponds e.g. to Hungarian Romani Aranya (https://books.google.com.au/book…)

MacKenzie is an Anglicisation (with garbled yogh) of MacCoinnich = Son of Kenneth: Mackenzie (surname) – Wikipedia.

What does the phrase “If Justine don’t get it, shut it down”, chanted by those protesting against Justine Damond’s killing in Minneapolis, mean?

It’s inserting Justine Damond’s name into the protest chant “If we don’t get it [justice], shut it down”, which has become associated with Black Lives Matter among others, and which also turns up as the hashtag #shutitdown:

Justice: If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down! (with images, tweets) · krissmissed

If We Don’t Get It, Shut It Down

Chanting Hashtags and Hashtagging Chants – The Civic Beat – Medium

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” has been a common chant at rallies—in other words, “If we don’t get justice, shut down the system.” The chant you hear in this video also includes the names of individuals who have died. At protest events, the names of those who passed are often transformed into hashtags, like #MikeBrown and #EricGarner.

What does”JP, tellement P” mean?

JP tellement P après ces 24h convention dédicaces conférence train taxi stream de l’infini (“0_0)

— Mr. Benzaie DANIEL (@Benzaie_tgwtg) June 12, 2017

Jp tellement p c’est assez ardu

— juju (@Juliette_Vein) December 30, 2016

This is a texting abbreviation, transferred over to Twitter. I’m not sure, but I *think* this is JPP j’en pense plus, “I think more about it = I could say much more about this”, intensified with tellement: “I could say so much more about this.”

At a guess. If I’ve got it wrong, I’ve now tagged the question so a French-speaker can tell me so.

EDIT: Claire Delavallée’s answer. Downvotez-moi, s’il vous plaît!

What should I do to stop spending time on Quora and do other things in my life?

You’re breaking my heart with this question, Liana. It’s not like I’m managing it.

  • Nothing focuses the mind like a hard deadline. Get someone else to set you some, and hold you to account.
  • Make a point of walking away after a set period of time; or designate only a set period of time a day to spend on Quora.
  • Get people to hold you to that commitment.
  • If A2A notices and notification alerts keep distracting you, zap them all.
  • Take the app off your phone.
  • Deactivate.
  • Delete.
  • No, I’m not doing any of these. With the exception of maybe the first one.

Could you do your local rendition of “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”?

So how *would* I render this in Klingon?

A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter.

Therefore, obviously,

jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup!

A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to pay for a transporter system, I am prepared to give an Empire!

How come the Greek peninsula remained Orthodox Christian and Greek, but Anatolia and Thrace/Constantinople got ‘Islamified’ and ‘Turkified?’

Pre-1453 and Post-1453 policy.

Before 1453, Christians were given the status of Christians anywhere in Islamdom as dhimmis, and were subject to missionary activity, as described in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?.

Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in the 14th and 15th centuries, and presumably is to be associated with the more fervent Islam of the Turkish emirates, rather than the stability of the preceding Seljuk Sultanate. Just because you’re conquered by Muslims doesn’t mean there is immediate pressure for you to convert. For a parallel, see the Copts of Egypt; I learned (from Dimitris Almyrantis, I think) that the mass conversions to Islam only date from the 10th century.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Rum Millet was instituted by Mehmed II, which afforded Christians in the Ottoman Empire a good deal more autonomy, and less pressure to convert. Accordingly, there was not actually that much missionary activity in the Balkans, or for that matter in the Rûm Eyalet (the Pontus, which was conquered only after the Rum Millet was established). The Muslim indigenous populations in the Balkans (Albanians, Bosniaks) and in the Pontus (Greek-speaking Muslims) resulted from deliberate missionary activity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they had limited scope. (See e.g. Islamization of Albania)

How is being drunk perceived in your culture?

I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let it drink you.”

(“In Soviet Russia” joke opportunities ignored.)

Greek drinking culture is accompanied by nibbles (mezze), expressly so as to avert quick inebriation—especially if brandy (ouzo, raki) rather than wine is involved. Wine, for that matter, features at the dinner table rather than in the mezze joint. There is a word for drinking without nibbles: xerosfyri, “dry hammer”; the etymology may in fact be “dry + whistling” or a corruption of “dry + sieved”. There is a word for it, precisely because it is looked down upon. Indeed, British drinking culture, with its drinking xerosfyri, was an easy target of criticism for my aunts and uncles in Greece. (Their children of course were already going to bars and knocking back whisky anyway.)

Accompanying this, Greek slang has about as many words for being drunk as Eskimo is alleged to have for snow: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some slang phrases to describe getting drunk in your language or country?