Iti minca cinii din straita

Monday, 22 January, Year 10 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

The titular expression is the superlative Romanian descriptor of hopeless, desperate stupidity. Let's look at it together.

  • Iti is the reflexive / passive, meaning that it denotes either an action done by the 2nd person to itself, or else an action done by a foreign person to the 2nd. Whether we're dealing with the former case ("iti maninci de sub unghii" = you eat from under your own nails) or the latter depends on whether an agent is stated.
  • minca is a regional form of the verb to eat (a minca, same as manger in French etc). Since it's in the third person we know that the above finds itself in the latter rather than the former situation.
  • cinii is a regional form of the noun for dogs (ciine, directly from Latin canem). So it'd appear dogs eat something-to-do-with-person-spoken-to.
  • straita is a regional name for that ancient item of garb, the food bag. Amusingly enough it arrived into Romanian most likely from Albanian! Anyway, all those knitted square bag things hung around the neck of hipsters ? Straite, totally.

So : "the dogs eat from your food bag", meaning that you are so fucking stupid the only way to feed you is to first feed all the dogs so they can't be arsed to steal "your" food which you're too inept and ineffectual to deny them. Consequently your survival depends strictly on whether there's enough food to satisfy all the dogs first, or in other words nobody can ever love you.i

There's a reason for disgrace, you understand. Ineptitude is that reason. I trust you follow the logic.

———
  1. Because how could they ?! You're not here for any direct reason, you're only here because you haven't been eaten yet, exactly like plankton. This makes you directly unaddressable, something that can't properly speaking be referenced, therefore incapable of identity and consequently not a proper subject of anyone's thoughts. []
Category: Trilenciclopedia
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