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15:21 Aug 29, 2008
English to English translations [PRO] Art/Literary - Slang / Insults
English term or phrase:distoon
I was wondering if anyone could help me out and explain what this word means? The context is just one other word "mulignan" which I found is an insult. Thanks!:)
Explanation: Possibly -- among other things, Distoon is vernacular for DisneyToon Studios, where 'toon' is an American phonetic spelling of 'tune', short for 'cartoon'.
Subject to further context, a 'distoon mulignan' could thus be a cartoon-figure 'mulignan', which would translate into something like (to avoid being overly offensive) 'goofey darkey'.
I don't see any obvious indication from googling that 'distoon' is itself insulting.
It could be a typo, but it might be the result of spell checking - 'distoon' is more lilkely to be recognised than 'ditsoon' or 'ditsune', and it may have been changed automatically or erroneously by someone who didn't understand the meaning of the term.
From what I can tell the people involved in this story are of Italian descent (except the boyfriend) but live in USA. Things like place in time and level of education are unknown really. The context unfortunatelly is rather limited so most of the time Ive to guess.
Thanks. That makes my suggestion less plausible. What do you know about the setting (date, place, social situation and ethnic background of the persons, level of education, etc.)? If the term is Italian, it could be dialect or bastardized.
because the sentence was "Anna's father calls her boyfriend a distoon and mulignan". It could as well be a typing error (since no search engine seems to recognize this word) but thats what I got.
What exactly is your context? 'distoon mulignan' or 'mulignan distoon', perhaps? And in what further context does this set of words appear?
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Answers
20 mins confidence: peer agreement (net): +1
Possibly relates to racial mixing
Explanation: Given that mulignan is a racial insult, and extrapolating from words like quadroon or octoroon etc, which relate to people's ancestry, it could be someone who has a distant ancestor who was black - dist- (distant) -oon (offspring of black/white/mixed parents.)
kmtext Local time: 02:23 Native speaker of: English, Gaelic
Explanation: Can't find anything for Distoon except that it's the name of a film from the Disney studios, which it would hardly be if it were a racial insult.
Could it possibly be "dis coon"? "Coon" is an insulting word for black people, and "dis coon" is a variant of it in alleged imitation of the way they talk.
Ragged But Right: Black Travelling Shows, "Coon Songs", and the ... - Google Books Result
by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff - 2007 - 461 pages
(Dis Coon Has Got De Blues)," in which "the pleading of a melancholy 'cullud' gen'man" was said to be "vividly depicted." In 1901 black composers Chris ...
books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=1578069017...
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 28 mins (2008-08-29 15:50:14 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Explanation: Possibly -- among other things, Distoon is vernacular for DisneyToon Studios, where 'toon' is an American phonetic spelling of 'tune', short for 'cartoon'.
Subject to further context, a 'distoon mulignan' could thus be a cartoon-figure 'mulignan', which would translate into something like (to avoid being overly offensive) 'goofey darkey'.
I don't see any obvious indication from googling that 'distoon' is itself insulting.
The translation workplace 
peer agreement (net): +1
