Humorous Hawaiian

Posted by jackrabbit on October 9th, 2008 | Categorized as General Forum | Tagged as Hawaiian Pidgin English lingo slang spam pipi pupu grin | 149 views and 2 Comments

I lived in Hawaii for a short time (few months), as did my Mom in her childhood for a much longer time (four years). There are a lot of Hawaiian words which would cause a lot of English speakers to do a double-take, here’s a few:

 SPAM - It’s a food, not a mass-email. Canned meat, to be exact, kind of looks like the inside of a hot dog, but comes in a big square lump, and besides luau pig it’s pretty much Hawaii’s national meat :). They even put it on their sushi, haha. During Y2K the joke was that Hawaiians were dashing around stocking up on water, flashlight batteries, and Spam.

 PUPU’S - Appetizers/ hor d’oevres. Yes, pronounced exactly like it looks - poo-poo! What an appetizing name for appetizers (not).

PIPI - Meat/Beef. Pronounced pee-pee, just like you thought. So, if you cut spam up into little squares and put them on a plate, you are offering pipi as pupu’s. LOL

ONO - Great tasting. Sounds like Oh no! The pipi pupu’s are ono…

GRIND - Eat. (Not actually Hawaiian language, just Pidgin English). So, I grind the ono pipi pupu’s. (You have to try saying that randomnly during a meal. Stun the entire party into silence.)

BRAH. Brother/friend. A version of bro. Yup, it is pronounced bra, like the women’s undergarment. So, brah, I’m gonna grind the pipi pupu’s. Mmmm, ono!

Aloha, Shalom, Bonjour, Danse, Hola, Konichiwa! Spent a portion of my childhood living on a Native American reservation in Canada because we used to man the post office there. So my culture is a mix between my own ethnic Dutch-Scottish-English-Irish-Austrian-Romanian, and Native culture. My Mom was a military brat who assimilated French, Japanese, and Hawaiian culture, so I also have those in my culture mix too. I've lived fourteen places, spread among two countries/one continent and an island. That's the short version!