I've written before about the placename element -stan and its use. It's not only for playing on American ignorance of Central Asia, but gets extended to the U.S., as noted earlier: Dumbfuckistan = 'parts of the United States that voted for Bush'.
A couple of times, most recently this morning on the radio, I've heard Berserkistan, basically meaning, as far as I can tell, the transparent 'crazy land'. This cracks me up for a presumably unintended reason: I can't hear that joke without thinking of it as the land of the original guys called berserkr, the warrior cult — not the metal band. That's a stamp you don't want in your passport.
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ReplyDeleteI may not be the most learned or erudite reader . . .but this:
"I can't hear that joke without thinking of it as the land of the original guys called berserkr, the warrior cult — not the metal band. That's a stamp you don't want in your passport."
...leaves me scratching my head.
Simply a matter of 'cultural ignorance' on my part I am sure.
Reminiscent of Be(r)serkley for Berkeley...
ReplyDeleteSorry, didn't mean to be obscure, especially when it was a very funny point. Here's a rough sketch of the background: In early Germanic times, there was a cult of particularly aggressive warriors. They wore bear or wolf skins -- in Old Norse, ber + serkr means 'bear-shirt' (and some stories have it that they went into battle naked, I think) -- and whipped themselves into wild frenzies. This is the source of our word 'berserk'.
ReplyDeleteI was just trying to say that the usual meaning of 'crazy land' for Berserkistan is kind of funny, but the thought of going to a land populated by actual berserkers is pretty scary.
Going to Be(r)serk(e)ley is a very different trip.
Actually, I'm the one who coined the term.
ReplyDeleteIn 1995 I was a photog in Russia and Chechnya. Going through Moscow i picked up the paper and in it was some sort of outbreak of craziness in some "I-stan" I had never heard of. Collectively started calling them "Berserkistan."
Fast forward to later that year when I met Mike Linder, LA producer and original concept originator of America's Most Wanted. (www.linder.com)
We launched the first strictly Internet based news service in history from Bosnia (where I had been working through the early 90s).
This was back when a 56k modem was hot stuff.
It was called..."Berserkistan."
Fragments of it are scattered around the internet to this day.
Jim Bartlett