Passed on by Chris Hansen on Facebook, this story of 6/23 from thelocal.no (“Norway’s news in English”), “Is this the worst summer job ever?”:
A nineteen-year-old in Norway has been hired by a sexual health charity to play a giant penis who surprises passers-by by spraying them with golden confetti.
“I thought it was hilarious. If I can do a good thing for others, just by being a dick, there is nothing better,” Philip van Eck, the man inside the penis costume, told Norway’s Tønsberg Blad newspaper.
It’s all about STDs.
The tagline for this story in Nowegian Bokmål is:
(1) Tiss kan overraske.
which is interestingly ambiguous.
Background: Norwegian has three grammatical genders (masc neut fem) and two (related) lexical items tiss:
tiss neut (mass noun: definite singular tisset) ‘pee’ (clearly onomatopoetic)
tiss masc (count noun: definite singular tissen, indefinite plural tisser, definite plural tissene) ‘pee-pee, willy’ (childish term for the penis)
So: (1) is either ‘pee can surprise you’ or ‘a willy can surprise you’.
