JOKES FROM THE INTERNET PART III: Dark humour from Syrian Salabina

Syrian Salabina is a Facebook group that produces a lot of memes and short comedic videos. salabiina سلبينا is a slang term for somebody who makes jokes out of everything. It’s derived from the verb  سلبها على séléb-ha 3ala, which means something like ‘pretend not to know things in order to trick someone’ or ‘act stupid’. This suffix -iina – though I have no idea where it’s derived from – is apparently used to make pejorative nouns in a similar way to the suffix -ji. It occurs in at least one another word, fakhfakhiina, which you might translate as ‘posho’ or ‘stuck-up’ (from فخفخة fakhfakha, the maSdar of tfakhfakh ‘act posh’, ultimately derived from fakhkhaame ‘fancy, elevated’).

Anyway, this (quite dark) meme is characteristic of their humour and also contains some puns (woo!!! puns!!!!) which are always good in vocabulary building.

syrian salabina

الإعلامية: الجيوش المشاركة في الحرب السورية لم تحقق أهدافها بعد
ميسي: لك من كتر اهداف الجيوش يلي عم تقصف سوريا ما ضل في جمهور
al2i3laamiyyah: aljuyuushu lmushaarikatu fii l7arbi ssuuriyyati lam tu7aqqiq 2ahdaafa-haa ba3du
Meesi: lak min kitr ahdaaf ijjuyuush yalli 3am té2Sof suuriya maa Dall fii jémhuur
News presenter: The armies taking part in the Syrian war have not yet realised their goals
Messi: With all the goals scored by the armies striking Syria there’s no spectators left

The first line is in MSA and probably doesn’t need that much explanation. بعدُ is an adverb used quite a lot in MSA for ‘yet’ (although some teachers of Arabic/native speakers don’t like it, for some reason).

The second line depends on a number of football-related puns which I’ve tried (semi-successfully imo!!!) to transfer into English.

لك lak – very difficult to translate into English, but often prefixes emphatic or assertive statements. Useful to start using.

من كتر min kitr – here, and very often, من indicates the source of something (‘from’ can also do this in English sometimes). كتر is obviously from كتير and means ‘the large amount of’. It can be followed by a noun, as here, or it can have a ما suffixed to it and then be followed by a sentence: من كتر ما عم بحكي تعبت min kit@r ma 3am be7ki t3éb@t ‘I’ve got tired because of how much I’m talking’.

أهداف ahdaaf – the plural of هدف. You’ve probably learnt this as ‘goal’ or ‘aim’ in the sense of something that someone wants to achieve – the sense it’s used in the first line. In MSA coverage of football, however, it also means ‘goal’ in the football sense (it’s also used in 3aamiyye but I think gool is probably more common).

يلي yalli – a regional/personal variant of اللي. I don’t think there’s any particular reason why one is used over the other.

عم تقصف – the word قصف is used a lot in discussions of war and fighting, I think more than in English, and means ‘strike’ or I guess ‘attack with explosive weapons’. So قصف is the normal word used for mortar attacks, shelling, artillery fire and airstrikes. It’s also used in football terminology, as English ‘strike’, for goal-scoring.

ماضل في maa Dall fii – ضل means ‘to remain, to stay’. I suppose it’s derived from MSA ظلّ. The last word, في, is the في used to mean ‘there is’ or ‘there are’. They could equally have said فيّا or فيها ‘in it [fem]’, referring to Syria.

جمهور jémhuur – this is another pun. جمهور can be used for ‘audience’ or ‘spectators’ at a football match, but it’s also used for ‘the people’ (as in جمهورية).

So yeah. That’s dark.