#e.g. Valintalato vs. Valintatalo. latter was a real grocery store in Finland and the name means 'choice house'

[mcrmadness]

My Finnish favorite pun is still in one of the (I think) Don Rosa comics, but it could have been someone else's too. Anyhow, the Ducks were in a museum and there were two "statues" of ancient people at the background, one with a sign 'muimies' and the other one with a sign 'muinainen'. I can't remember which one of these you read first and I also can't find images of the comic anywhere. Anyhow, an explanation follows next:

"Mui-mies" doesn't mean anything, but it has a word "mies" in it which means "man". So you assume okay, it's a man from a (fictional) nation called Mui. And then you look at the other statue that says "Mui-nainen" and you laugh because 'nainen' = 'woman', so it is saying a woman of a nation called Mui, BUT "muinainen" also means "ancient" in Finnish but it just happens to have the word "nainen" in it without it meaning anything there. That joke is the one that lives in my head rent free all the time.

One of the reasons why Donald Duck comics are so popular in Finland is because of the impressive creative effort that goes into the translations. The expressive language of the comics is distinct, there's this specific kind of goofy tone that the finnish versions have, to the point that if you grew up with them, it feels weird to read them in the original language with that iconic element missing.

I have completely forgotten which individual comic it was from, but there's one line of a certain comic that still lives in my head rent-free. I can't recall the full context, but in it Donald has once again spectacularly fucked up something - a dinner date? - with Daisy, and is lamenting his inevitable fate of having to face her fury.

The way his lament was in finnish was "Alkupalaksi pajunköyttä, pääruokana ankka omassa liemessään, ja jälkiruuaksi muutama korvapuusti!" which naturally just looks like someone beating their head against the keyboard to my non-finnish readers, but I'll need to have the original line to fully translate it in finnish context. Literally translated it goes "Some willow rope for an appetizer, a duck in its own broth for the main course, and for dessert, a few cinnamon rolls!" Which makes varying amounts of sense.

But in finnish, the expression "to feed someone willow rope" means to lie to someone, deceive them, to blow smoke up someone's ass. I have no idea why. The word liemi (sauce/broth/stock) is also used for "trouble" - finns can say that someone is "in a broth" in the same way that in english, one could say that someone is "in a pickle". And the finnish word for the finnish type of cinnamon roll is also used to refer to an open-faced slap in the face - the shape and spiral of the cinnamon roll very vaguely resembles an ear, and that kind of a slap also gets your ear.

So while the lament itself, which could have just been some bland expression of "oh dearest me, I am in trouble", is an one-sentence avalanche of food-related puns which can be interpreted as "first I will lie to her, then she will eat me alive when she realises the mess I've made, and as the final note she'll probably slap me."