Crash!

Just heard this in my office …

לקרש את הסרבר

LeKaresh et HaServer

Which means…”To crash the server.”

Everything’s Cheddar Cheese

Just like with “zabaj,” its always fun to create new Israeli slang. Another invention of our’s is a slight twist on two popular phrases: “hakol beseder” and “beseder gamur,” which translate to “everything’s ok” and “perfectly ok.” I proudly present:

הכל בצ’דר and בצ’דר גמור (“hakol bechedder” and “bechedder gamur)

As you might imagine, we delighted in recognizing the phonetic similarities between “cheddar” and “beseder” in Hebrew. Even thought it doesn’t make any sense – “everything’s cheddar” and “perfectly cheddar” – we stand behind our new slag. So

next time you’re out and the waiter asks you if everything’s ok, tell him everything’s perfectly cheddar.

The FIRE is free!

Ever read your bill in a restaurant? You should…you’re bound to catch some funny stuff.

We ordered 477 shecks worth of sushi and the restaurant gave us some free FIRE. I’m not so sure what the FIRE was, but thank G-d they didn’t charge us for it.

I took a picture of it with my crappy cell phone camera. See for yourself …

*Click on thumbnail for full-sized image.

There’s a Good Chance that Sounds Awkward as Hell

Overheard in a conversation today:

(lo l’kachat “chance-im”) “לא לקחת “צ’נסים

This means “not to take chances.” Fair enough. Except, there’s already a word in Hebrew for chance, folks: (sicui) סיכוי

But, in typical hoity-toity style, some Israelis have to punctuate their speech with an awkward sounding English word with a Hebrew suffix tacked on the end of it.

I mean, what’s so cool about the word “chance?” It’s not even intuitive – it contains letters NOT in the Hebrew alphabet!

Ugh.

Again: YOU HAVE A WORD FOR THIS.

So, I’m sitting in a military truck-driving course (more stories to come on that) circa 2005 and hear the following:

ללחוץ ברקסים (l’lchotz brakes-im)

(To press the brakes)

Now, the English word “brakes” has a word in Hebrew, surprisingly enough: בלמים (blamim).

Just like l’des-ces. A word already exists that doesn’t sound retarded.

But, lo — they needed to bastardize a perfectly good (plural!) English word and add their own plural suffix to it: brakesim.

And, unlike “browniesim,” this is actually in use:

*Click on thumbnail for full-sized image.

Shocking

Know how you say “I was in shock” in Hebrew?

הייתי בשוק – (Hayiti B’Shock)

The 32nd Flavor

Israeli ice cream shops have funny flavors. Not so much cuz they taste funny, but the spellings are hilarious. One of my all time favorites has been

Cockies and Cream

It’s ice cream with little chunks of cockies mixed in. Sounds yummy. It even looks like cockies.

My friend Nir just told me about a funnier ice cream flavor. On the corner of Weizmann and Tel Hai, there is a small ice cream shop. On each bucket of ice cream, there were stickers with Hebrew handwritten flavors. I have no idea what this flavor would taste like. Let’s see if you can guess. The flavor was called …

אייס קרים

That’s right … ice cream flavored ice cream.

פרקינגס and טסט

I just got my car inspected yesterday. Apparently there is no word in Hebrew for inspection, so they use the English word … “Test.” At one point, they were checking my emissions, so the attendant asked my to put my car in “Parkings.”

You know, the P on my shifter stands for “Parkings.”

“sorry” אני ממש

Sometimes an expression of an Israelis’ high level of intelligence comes from their ability to incoporate English words and phrases into their Hebrew conversation. One of the most common is indeed “ani mamash sorry” which means “I’m really sorry.” Often this phenomenon can get pretty ridiculous though. Overheard:

“‘I’ll vouch for you’ זה משנקרא ” (It’s what’s called ‘I’ll vouch for you’)

The awkward accented English in the middle of an otherwise fluent sounding Hebrew conversation is what makes this funny. Send us some good ones if you hear them.