Norwegian language council trying to come up with a Norwegian word for "hashtag"

emneknagg

translated back to English: "topic-knob" or "topic-hook"

needless to say, this is extremely cringe.

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@thor that reminds me of the bad old times when the Internet was still new and Poland was still heavily damaged by the communist rule with more people speaking Russian than English and computers themselves being very rare. There's been a fairly popular movement to translate all computer tech-speak to Polish, usually either extremely literally, by creating compound words / phrases with many syllables, or just completely arbitrarily.

So a link was supposed to be "ogniwo", a 3-syllable word literally meaning a physical chain link, click was supposed to be "mlask", an onomatopoeia of smacking lips, and a mouse was supposed to be "manipulator stołokulotoczny", as if anyone would ever use that abomination (meaning table-rolling manipulator) in casual speech.

Thankfully it died a horrible death and its only remainders are a couple of least offensive survivors (the @ sign is called "małpa" meaning "monkey" for some reason) and this silly anecdote.

Never let people claiming to be authorities on your language change your language.

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