- Tankero
The tankero was originally a
fiction alanimal that was quite popular in Finnish media in the 1970s.The word is said to have been coined when
Prime Minister of Finland Ahti Karjalainen visited aKenya nzoo in the 1970s. He is reported as having said "Kaikki eläimet ovat tankeroita" (Finnish for "All animals are "tankero"), after misunderstanding a sign that said "All animals are dangerous".This was so popular that one Finnish magazine held a drawing competition of what the tankero would look like. The Finnish
political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen drew a strip whereKalevi Sorsa meets Karjalainen and a strange-looking animal he is carrying on a leash. "Is that a tankero?" asks Sorsa, and the strange-looking animal replies "No, that's Ahti."During the same period a certain amount of jokes, based on English-Finnish language misunderstandings, were current: for example a person mistakenly greeting a
Crimea n by calling him criminal. These jokes were labelled as "tankero-jokes" and generally told with Ahti Karjalainen as the main character.The original meaning fell into disuse after Karjalainen's death, and today it is a
slang word for something that is awkward or not properly developed, especially poor knowledge of thepronunciation orgrammar of a foreign language.It should be noted that by far the most common use of the tankero-word today is "tankero-englanti" or "tankero-English", meaning poorly pronounced English. The term has very strong connotations of awkward-sounding pronunciation with a very strong Finnish accent. The actual grammar and vocabulary of "tankero-English" may well be correct, though.
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