Toma Sota Balcu

If I die in my sleep tonight I'll be sure to let you know.

I'm not afra-
hey! who's that on-

GAK!

Oh this is just a Bloody Mary rip-off. Think somebody is trying to see how many Google hits for "Toma sota balcu" they can get out of this?

165 pages so far.

and how is a little girl going to bury me? bring it on i say.

I'm wondering if that's an anagram of some sort. I've messed with it a little and can't figure out one.

Toma is a common Romanian first name (Thomas) and both Sota and Balcu are Romanian last names. Does this bring us closer to any kind of solution?

Actually if I think about it, Toma is also a common last name in Romanian, not just a first name. So we have three Romanian last names or a Romanian name - compound last name. Can all this be a coincidence?

http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/
Brings up more than a few anagrams. My favorite is AMOS AT OAT CLUB.

Probably the signature of the person that came up with it. Do you have a translation for Sota and Balcu? Crap....duh, there's a Romanian that works here.

Oh, great, Alex, so now YOU'RE safe, and the rest of us are going to get suffocated. Thanks a LOT!

He said they're phoenetic spellings, someone hearing the Romanian and writing down what they heard in english without knowing what the meaning was so its hard to translate, or its code for something.

I do not understand - do we have a week to post a message or not?

Well, the second and third words are indeed Romanian last names, but they don't mean anything. There are names in other languages too (including English) that aren't necessarily meaningful, right?

"There are names in other languages too (including English) that aren't necessarily meaningful, right?"
As far as I know, almost all names in English and in all other languages that I know anything about mean something, or at least used to mean something. The exception would be the dumb-sounding names (in my opinion) that people occasionally cook up for themselves or their children out of thin air.
My name (Gary), for example, is an old Anglo-Saxon name that meant something like "Spear Carrier." My last name means "Barrel Maker."
However, most English speakers don't know what these names mean, although neither name is unusual in English.

Charybdis! How dare you give us that link! It's addictive!!
:ahhh:

Now I can't give you a counter-example of a name that doesn't mean anything, because you'll say that "probably it used to mean something long ago", and you're probably right. At least in Romanian there are a lot of loan words and names from other neighbouring languages. Such loan words were usually taken up with a phonetical spelling, the new word not meaning anything. After that, add some hundreds of years of "weathering in common people's mouths" and you'll end up with a name not resembling anything. Probably both Sota and Balcu used to mean something in Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian etc, but I bet the guy behind the urban legend had no intention of using this meaning.

Compare how the Ellis Island immigration officers spelled a newcomer's name: for example Tony Curtis was of Hungarian origin (his family was called Kert̩sz before he went to America, meaning "gardener") but who would today know what his name means?

Big Gary C's real name is Gary Cooper? Somehow the screen name now fits...

Since we're talking about last names now, does anyone know a site where you can reasearch where a last name came from? Although I've tried to reasearch it, no one can figure out what my last name means and since my family came from England the spelling shouldn't be all that different...

Zoltan, I'm not sure I understand your comment that loan words don't mean anything in the new language. If they don't mean anything, most people wouldn't bother to say them, since the principal purpose of speaking is to communicate something.
English also contains a great many loan words (perhaps all languages do), but each loan word means something in English, and usually the English meaning is not too far from the meaning in the source language.
Speaking of Ellis Island, apparently it's something of a legend that the clerks there routinely changed people's family names. Ellis Island had a large corps of interpreters, most of whom were native speakers of the immigrants' home languages, and in any case the names registered at Ellis Island were usually copied directly from the passenger lists of the arriving ships. Last summer, I visited the Ellis Island museum, and the curators there said they have been trying to find documented cases of names being capriciously changed by the immigration inspectors, but so far they haven't come up with any examples.
As for Tony Curtis, if you mean the actor who was in "Some Like it Hot," according to the "World Almanac and Book of Facts," his original name (before he adopted the stage name Tony Curtis) was Bernard Schwartz. I'm not sure what the W.A.& B.o.F.'s source is for this information. What's yours?

Fay-Fay, if you'll tell me what that last name is, I'll see what I can do.

Correct, my mistake. There are a lot of Hungary-related sources stating that the original name of Tony Curtis was Kert̩sz - see for example http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/85/rq-85-huntastic.html - but they are all wrong. The actor's parents were indeed Hungarians, but they were called Schwartz (lots of German last names even in Hungary, many of their owners Jewish), as you said. In any case, if you google around a bit, you'll find many cases of Kert̩sz becoming Curtis, and probably that was producing the confusion.

Big Gary: I didn't mean loan words, but names. To stick with the Hungarian examples: what does Pataki mean in English? Or Sarkozy in French? Nothing. Yet, the names of these famous politicians are of Hungarian origin (pataki = from the river, sarkozy = from S

Yes, there probably was some simplification of spelling (that is, making it more like English spelling), and no doubt characters that don't exist in English tended to be changed or dropped (since there were no keys for those characters on the typewriters used at Ellis Island), and any place you have people (some of them not too well-educated) writing a lot of things in a hurry, there will be a good many outright mistakes. A substantial minority of the immigrants came from countries using the Cyrillic or other alphabets, so their names obviously had to be transliterated before they could be written in the Latin alphabet at all (I speak here only of writing systems used in Europe, because very few non-Europeans came in through Ellis Island).
But all of this is different from the legends I had heard about officials who just arbitrarily changed names from "Giannopoulos" to "Smith" or from "Kozlowski" to "Brown."
Also, many names were eventually changed either by the immigrants (or their descendants) themselves or by employers or others, and in later generations those changes have tended to be attributed to "Ellis Island."
I don't think admitting that names were changed would reduce tourism to Ellis Island, and this would help, rather than hinder, people tracing their geneologies, so long as they knew what the name had been changed to (which would most often be their own current family name).

Dearing. We've also seen it spelled Deering. From what we know it probably came from England. If not, then it's from Ireland.

You know, you are starting to miss the point, which is that Alex has enabled an evil girl imp to kill us tonight.

Regardless of the curse, I think the fact that you can also make it say A CASUAL BOTTOM is pretty great stuff.

Yes, Lina, but if I had my druthers, I'd like to spend my last few moments discussing linguistics.

Oh, a HOMICIDAL murderer. As opposed to all those other kinds of murderers. I bet he buried her in dirt made of earth, too.

>>>OR...we kick the shit out of that little girl when she comes visiting....(careful not to mistake any cooky selling girlscouts for her. <<<

It ought to be easy to tell the difference, since girl scouts rarely stick to the ceiling, as far as I know. 😊

Has it occured to anyone that you are in fact posting on a blog right now, and if you were really worried about the 'curse', you could just copy n' paste the message and put it in a post on this very thread, and that would technically suffice? Just sayin'....

Thank you for that awful suggestion, Barghest. The only problem with it is that after 1000 copies of Toma Sota Balcu have been posted on this site, an insane blogger named Alex might start appearing on people's ceilings. 🐍

"What is that on the ceiling? It's mumbling to itself...something about haunted pregnant women on eBay made from elephant dung?"

"I think it's that Alex guy. Get me the broom."

"No, let's catch him in a jar and let him out in the backyard. If you squash a blogger it's bad luck, makes it rain or something...."

It's past midnight and I'm still cool.

Anagrams and Romanian barrel makers aside, this seems very similar to legends that have grown up around sleep paralysis, sometimes known as 'old hag syndrome'.
This occurs when you are just awake (either going to sleep or waking up), and your body is still paralysed (as it is every time you are asleep).
Interesting article here about a program on the subject from the observer, no buried girls selling cookies I'm afraid, you'll have to make do with a giant demonic bat:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0%2C6903%2C596608%2C00.html

Klaatu...

My grandfather's father came here as O'Mahoney, no one really knows that story about why the O' was dropped. Ol' John James enlisted in the military when he got here. We have a copy of the ship's manifest, there were quite a few O'Mahoneys on the ship, but according to my grandfather, they weren't our family. The little info we have is that he worked in a castle named for the O'Mahoney family...but we haven't been able to back that up.

A CASUAL BOTTOM
is a good anagram from these words!

Sorry Alex, but just in case, I would like to say:

TOMA SOTA BALCU

Thank you. I think I will sleep better now.

Barghest, what are you, crazy?
If you caught the ghost of Blogger Alex in a jar, think how much you could get for that jar on eBay!
And you'd let him out again?!?

Dominus vobiscum
Et cum spiritu two oh
Don't you eat my sleazy pancakes
Just for Saintly Alphonzo

That's the counter chant.

A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.

Sorry, but I've been having enough trouble sleeping as it is. ;_;

<<<Sorry Alex, but just in case, I would like to say:

TOMA SOTA BALCU

Thank you. I think I will sleep better now.>>>

Ditto

Will I see her tits?

Good news all around: last night I did not die. I did wake up at 6:30 though. Trust me, I checked the ceiling. Clean.

A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.

A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded.
O.K., I ot freaked out, sorry.

It's hoax. No flashing boobs. Not even a girl. Am I really that ugly?

Chaos. Disorder. Chain blog postings. My work here is done.

"A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded."

I feel really stupid doing this. Really stupid.

"A girl died in 1933 by a homicidal murderer. He buried her in the ground when she was still alive. The murdered chanted, "Toma sota balcu" as he buried her. Now that you have read the chant, you will meet this little girl. In the middle of the night she will be on your ceiling. She will suffocate you like she was suffocated. If you post this, she will not bother you. Your kindness will be rewarded."

Better safe than sorry.

yeah, I found a pretty awkward Anagram...
"TO A CAUSAL TOMB"
Is that creepy or lame... I haven't decided yet...
I think anything with the word tomb is creepy anywhoo...
ARG, Why'd I even read it in the first place?

Some idiot has spread it on MSN Messenger/Hotmail now :|

Scared the shit outta me :( I didn't send it and I'm still breathing, I feel cool saying that 😊.

I ran it through some translators and "Toma" means "Taking" in spanish, and "Takes" in Portugese, and "Volume" In italian. Maybe the Murderer thought that she had her volume up too loud on her Grammaphone.

Probably the name changings at Ellis Island legend came from strange transliterations from non-latin languages. I visited Ellis Island this year and found my Great-Great Grandma Sivia listed as Ciwia. I had to think awhile before I figured out where the "w" came from. My family came from Poland and spoke yiddish. Yiddish is written using hebrew letters, so her name would have been spelled samech, vav, yud, aleph. In hebrew, or in this case yiddish, there are 2 letters that make a v sound. vet makes a typical v sound, and vav makes an accented v sound which doesn't appear at all in the english lanugage, in fact, most english speakers (including me) can't even distinguish between the two. When it was transliterated to english, the people at ellis island probably just wrote a W in place of the vav because there wasn't any english letter that could make that sound. Transliterations like this one from foreign languages probably were the result in a ton of name-changes.