It’s Arabic. The pic is a pun on “Good morning” which is written sabah el-fol. The picture says sabah el-farawla which roughly translates to “Good Strawberring”.
Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.
brief Arabic cultural lesson for those who care
You have your Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace, صباح الخير) in English. In Arabic we have more variations. The standard reply to this first one is Morning of Light (صباح النور). Basically wishing each other a good day by describing what makes it good. There’s a couple but these first two in this order is the standard (and secular *) greeting.
* you’ll see why that is even worth pointing out in a second
Then you have more abstract ones that imply a good day by referring to something (commonly a pleasant smelling flower), like Morning of Roses (صباح الورد) or Morning of (a specific type of) Jasmine (صباح الفل). All of these have a musical quality to them in a way I can’t write out.
You’ll get older relatives sending you standardized photos with these greetings in groups or just to text you to invite you for lunch (or to fix their phone). Here’s the google images result for Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace):
I’ve highlighted the religious stuff in red and the roses with blue, to see how common they are. The religious stuff is mostly variations with Islamic Duas (prayers asking for something - in the case of all of these it’s basically “asking” God to give the recipient good health / a good day / a pleasant path in life - it’s really just a “good luck” phrased in the only way a religious society can express it.
FWIW I’m (mostly) not from a Muslim family so I get secular or Christian versions of these. Often the photos I get are flowers, traditional breakfast food, coffee, a nice breakfast table set in a shaded garden. And often there’s very few pixels. Sometimes an aunt will just take a photo of her coffee and that’s basically a greeting. But it’s usually garbled old jpegs from 2007.
Critical subtext: these are literally forwards from grandma. Well-meaning, but eventually obnoxious, especially back when phones had 8GB of storage.
This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.
But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.
Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sex
It says “strawberry morning”, lit. “morning of strawberry” (might be misspelled??)
It’s a variation on common Arabic morning greetings, “good morning”, “morning of roses”, “morning of light”, etc.
What does the text on that beautiful Strawberry Elephant creature say? Looks like it’s in Farsi
It’s Arabic. The pic is a pun on “Good morning” which is written sabah el-fol. The picture says sabah el-farawla which roughly translates to “Good Strawberring”.
Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.
brief Arabic cultural lesson for those who care
You have your Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace, صباح الخير) in English. In Arabic we have more variations. The standard reply to this first one is Morning of Light (صباح النور). Basically wishing each other a good day by describing what makes it good. There’s a couple but these first two in this order is the standard (and secular *) greeting.
* you’ll see why that is even worth pointing out in a second
Then you have more abstract ones that imply a good day by referring to something (commonly a pleasant smelling flower), like Morning of Roses (صباح الورد) or Morning of (a specific type of) Jasmine (صباح الفل). All of these have a musical quality to them in a way I can’t write out.
You’ll get older relatives sending you standardized photos with these greetings in groups or just to text you to invite you for lunch (or to fix their phone). Here’s the google images result for Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace):
I’ve highlighted the religious stuff in red and the roses with blue, to see how common they are. The religious stuff is mostly variations with Islamic Duas (prayers asking for something - in the case of all of these it’s basically “asking” God to give the recipient good health / a good day / a pleasant path in life - it’s really just a “good luck” phrased in the only way a religious society can express it.
FWIW I’m (mostly) not from a Muslim family so I get secular or Christian versions of these. Often the photos I get are flowers, traditional breakfast food, coffee, a nice breakfast table set in a shaded garden. And often there’s very few pixels. Sometimes an aunt will just take a photo of her coffee and that’s basically a greeting. But it’s usually garbled old jpegs from 2007.
Critical subtext: these are literally forwards from grandma. Well-meaning, but eventually obnoxious, especially back when phones had 8GB of storage.
This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.
But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.
Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sexThis is PRECISELY why I’m a big fan of explaining jokes. Most of us wouldn’t have understood any of this context.
Great write up! Thnx
I think it’s just the Arabic for “strawberry elephant”? Hard to tell at that resolution
It says “strawberry morning”, lit. “morning of strawberry” (might be misspelled??)
It’s a variation on common Arabic morning greetings, “good morning”, “morning of roses”, “morning of light”, etc.
Oh I see