Proverb – Finnish

“Hetkinen sano Putkinen.”

“Wait says Putkinen.”

“Pukinen says, let’s wait a little bit.”

The informant is a 25-year-old insurance broker who grew up in Ohio and the Los Angeles region. His father is Finnish and his mother is a third generation Swedish American.

Putkinen was a politician “who was always slowing down the process”. It’s a saying to “just tell someone to wait” it’s like Putkinen says that we just need to keep waiting and not doing anything. He said it’s, “light-heartedly poking fun at this past governor guy”. One would use this proverb when a couple people were going to go somewhere and one of them wa like, “I’m not ready to go yet” they would say “Hetkinen sano Putkinen.” Like relax. The informant says he rarely ever says that it’s mainly his dad who says that, who moved to the United States from Finland when he was in college. The informant was born in the United States.

I think it makes sense that a Finnish American man who was born in the states wouldn’t have as much connection to this saying as his father would, who lived in Finland and has more of a personal connection to Finnish politics. It also makes sense that the informant wouldn’t want to allude to a politician that people in the United States likely wouldn’t know anything about, Americans would likely wonder why we should care that Putkinen says wait.

Putkinen