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Why? Honest question - a non-native speaker here. Does it have any hidden connotations, or just weird
by V-2 11y ago
Why? Honest question - a non-native speaker here. Does it have any hidden connotations, or just weird
- nefitty 11y ago"Jorf" is just an ugly word. It also evokes guttural body sounds like "barf" and "urgh", the kind someone makes when they're sick... It might be just from a native English speaker's perspective. I know English in general is not an appealing language to some ears from non-English speaking countries.
- V-2 11y agoThanks for shedding some light on it. Personally I quite like the sound of English (my native tongue being Polish), and "jorf" doesn't sound to me any worse than Jeff or Ralph :) but obviously I don't have the same sensitivity as native speakers.
- hobs 11y agoInteresting you say that, you may not know that Ralph is also slang for "to vomit". I don't think "to Jeff" is anything yet.
- V-2 11y agoHaha no I didn't. I just tried to think up an example of something phonetically similar but innocent, but there you go. Bad for Ralphs I guess. We've got an old idiom that subtitutes vomiting for "going to Riga" (the Latvian capital). Not really aimed against Latvians, it just plays on certain phonetic similarity of Ryga and "rzygać" (to puke). Different languages, same bag of tricks.