Because I am in the middle of grad school applications, the recent German class lesson on vocabulary words for university was unusually relevant. Usually our topics are things like A Hundred Words for Depression or How to Explain Why You Have Been Shoplifting. Besides the usual combination of thematic and trick questions to expose potentially unacceptable immigrants (How many years do students usually study in your home country? Is private contact between students and professors appropriate in your homeland?), we learned all the names for the various tiers of hierarchy within a university department, from HiWi (work-study assistant) to Professor (natch). As you can expect, in Germany there are a lot of different, narrowly defined degrees of seniority.
Of particular interest was the title for the position of department chair at a university, Lehrstuhl, which, predictably, almost literally translates (guess what "Stuhl" is in English?) There is one important difference. When I asked if we could say, "I am the department chair" as well as "I have the department chair," my instructor seemed to think that was a pretty ridiculous question. "One cannot be a chair," he smiled. Too right, I think.
image via amazon.com
image via amazon.com
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