Word Up: Asi

One of my coworkers has suddenly taken to referring to all and sundry as "asi."  Eating cake off of paper towels? Asi.  Undercuts? Asi.  Not saying thank you in triplicate?  Very asi.  Where did she pick it up?  And why now?  Time to pull out the dictionary.

But is there a clear answer?  According to the internet, being "asi" is basically being trashy, with a big helping of just general impolite.  One of the clarifications that comes up on Google is a "Hartz IV-Empfänger" or "Hartz-4ler", a word that I was totally at a loss for, but which gives you a sense of how important deep familiarity with the law is to all Germans, not to mention a willingness to enforce it.  Hartz IV is the part of the law created by the Hartz Commission that ensures unemployed Germans have money to pay for their bus passes and soccer team jerseys and annoying children with mohawks.  I'm sure most Germans could give you a bio of Hartz, too, without looking at Wikipedia, but I'm not that much of a local yet.

Word Up: Best-Ager

Dear Germans,

Just because you string two English words together does not mean you have made an English word or that this word is used in the English language.  Case in point: Best-Ager.  This is not English.  The word you are looking for is "senior."  Or, if you are feeling really cute, "Golden Oldie."  But not Best-Ager.  You may have it sweet here in Germany with your solid pensions, your great health care, and your thirty-days-vacation, but for many English speakers, "best" is either optimistic or just delusional.

Sincerely,
Me

P.S. English doesn't usually have hyphenated compound words.  That's totally your thing.

image via acteam.de

Olympia

It's that time of once-every-four-years again!  Olympics time!  Compared to the way we celebrated the month leading up to the Euro Cup in May, the Olympics is a pretty big let down here in Germany. In May, there were people thronging the streets in the jerseys as the rival European nations battled it out on the soccer field.  In the last two weeks, I haven't seen so much as a red, gold and black sweatshirt.

Maybe that's because Germany hasn't lived up to its potential this Olympic Games.  There has been no bigger let down for the Germans, according to the smug ex-handball stars that pass for television commentators in this day and age, than the national swim team.  Apparently Germans consider themselves to be very good at swimming.  I'm afraid that the rest of us would have to admit we've been more struck by the Phelpses and Lochtes of this world than the Biedermanns and Steffens, but for Germany, the hopes of a nation rested on this year's swim team.  And on the fencing team.  And on the judo team.  And don't forget the noble sport of ping pong.

But only the swim team failed to deliver.  Now, for a country like Canada, a less than stellar showing would be cause for a few halfhearted smiles and a long talk about the power of the Olympic spirit.  German sports commentators take a very different approach.  No montages of Olympic disappointments or downed athletes being comforted by their teammates for this television station, only could hard truth.  Nobody bore the brunt of this more than the swim team.  As the days went by without medals, and without even qualifying to be in the finals, the comments turned uglier and uglier.  Why is she smiling? they asked as an Olympic hopeful put on a brave face after failing to beat the best.  He should not be content just to sit by and watch! That I cannot understand! they blustered after another young German star, dripping wet and out of breath from sprinting underwater alongside the world's best Olympian ever, dejectedly claimed he was looking forward to cheering on his teammates in the next round - a round in which he would not be swimming.

Each day the German team poolside looked sadder and sadder.  Finally there was no more cheering, no more waving, no more smiling at the camera.  The faces of losers, intoned the commentator, showing a snap of a demoralized swimming team  checking their Facebook from their phones poolside, what went wrong? When the German swim coach came on with his tail between his legs and claimed that the swimmers were not conditioning hard enough and that they had gained bad habits early in their careers that no amount of training could break, it was all I could do to keep the television on.  Thank goodness I persevered, because I would have hated to miss seeing Michael Phelps breeze to gold for the umpteenth time.

But it's time to lighten up and think about what it means to be an Olympian.  These are the best of the best.  Each Olympic sport should have an extra lane for a normal fit person competitor, maybe a gym bunny or that friend of yours who has way too many photos of himself in a tank top, to run or swim or jump through hurdles in the middle of puddles alongside the Olympic athletes.  As he or she thrashed and stumbled along a half hour behind the athletes, those watching would realize once and for all how amazingly honed the skills of Olympians are.  I would like to volunteer the German sports commentators as the first normal fit people to hit the locker rooms and kickstart this new program, handball heroes or otherwise.

Wirklich? Really?: Kevin Allein Zu Hause

Movies in Germany are always dubbed into German from the original language.  Bad decision, Germany.  I mean, what is Robert Pattinson without that wonderfully evocative voice?  Hollywood heartthrobs, French television comedians, and Italian commercials all fall prey to voiceovers, with varying degrees of weirdness.  For one thing, there doesn't seem to be much tonal subtlety to the dubbing.  The delivery usually hits somewhere between manic and bouncing off the walls, which is great for How I Met Your Mother, but not so great for Carlos the Jackal.

Speed reading aside, most of these shows lose something in the translation to German.  Like catchphrases.  One of my coworkers was imitating ET yesterday with vacant eyes, a slowly rising pointer finger, and the line:  "ET zu Hause telefoniern."  Wrong, right? ET phones home, he doesn't spout German grammar exercises. Another coworker wanted to bond with me over memories of would-be burglars tripping over the booby-traps in children's classic Kevin Allein Zu Haus.  The problem here is not only the fact that I thought he was referring to some kind of old-world German morality tale before I remembered that Macaulay Culkin's character is called Kevin in Home Alone.  The rhythm is off.  The words are clunky.  I can't bear to look up Good Times' "Dyno-mite!" "Sprengstoff!" just doesn't have the same ring.

Word Up: noch ein Zauberspruch

Just when you think you are getting the hang of this German thing, you end up at a kids' party where a magician asks for the magic word, or Zauberspruch, and everybody takes a deep breath and intones in bored unison, "Hocus pocus [okay, all good - but wait - what? they're still going-] filibus, drei schwarzen Käter."  That's "fake Latin, fake Latin, fake Latin, three black tomcats" - in case you were wondering.  I was, but I managed to catch on pretty quickly before I embarrassed myself in a room full of 8-year-olds.  You should have seen the looks they gave me when I sang "Happy Birhday" - which for some reason is always sung here in English - without trying to sound like Werner Herzog.

Geschmack: Das Ecksofa

Keeping on the theme of German household basics, it's time you formally met the corner sofa, or Ecksofa.  One part sofa, one part pull-out couch, one part La-z-boy and all parts Ikea, the corner sofa is made for the most uncomfortable lounging experience possible.

It works like this.  Take a double bed.  Stretch it out so it's long enough for two very small people lying down head to toe or one Croatian basketball player.  Upholster it with vinyl.  Add shiny metal legs.  Now cut away one third of the bed to make a banana shape.  Instead of wastefully throwing out this one-third, ingeniously fold it up on top of the bed to make couch cushions so that, should the owners want, the monster bed can be reconstituted in the fullness of its original glory, to the chagrin of any and all normal-sized bed linens.  Make sure the cushions are uncomfortable.  Leave a weird peninsula hanging out at the side for full body "lounging".  Behold, the Ecksofa.

Sadly, despite its apparent multi-tasking capabilities, the Ecksofa fulfills none of its promises.  There is nothing more awkward than lying down on the corner piece, unless it's trying to sleep on the fold-out sofa.  It's like having a giant-sized rubber mattress at your disposal.  Good for swingers, bad for house guests.

image via thomaskachel.de

Wirklich? Really?: Wandtattoos

No matter how many times I emphatically pick English as my language of choice on YouTube, somehow the Internet remains convinced that I am a German.  That means German captions, German videos, and German advertisements - geared for decidedly German tastes.  Most recently that has meant ads for wall decals preceding my every video selection.  Like I said, German tastes.

Wall decals are part of a distinct German interior design trend.  These stickers are made to decorate the (white) walls of German apartments with uplifting words like "Love," "Power," and "Home," in letters that are at least two feet high and usually purple.  You can even order whole texts, mostly in English, of little poems or inspirational sayings that hit the register somewhere between Chicken Soup for the Soul and Hello Kitty. I could be getting this all wrong and they're actually step one of an immersive English language learning course. You can also purchase hearts, flowers, and creeping vines, all in sticker form to brighten up your home.

I would say there are two problems here.  The first one is that German landlords are rigid landlords who take the descriptor "institutional" as a compliment.  That means all apartments look exactly the same.  Well, not all, but mine, my friends', and at least half of the apartments I see on TV, and for the record, I watch a lot of real-estate-inspired television.  White walls are sprayed with plaster to keep you wondering if smudges are dirt or texture; stainless steel doorknobs are of the kind routinely used on handicap washroom stalls; all doors can be locked with a long, old-fashioned key that belongs on the keyring of someone best addressed as "Matron".  There is not a lot of raw potential to work with.  Combined with the fact that Germans seem to feel it is a national duty to buy Bauhaus-ish white furniture, and you have a lot of identical, monotone apartments.  But if I was going to try and make my apartment more homey without painting or betraying my homeland, I can't say that large scale wall decals would be my decorating method of choice.  I guess in Germany, nothing says home sweet home like stickers in a foreign language.

image via wandtattoos.de

Word Up: Oha! and Hä?

Maybe I have been spending too much time in Germany with speakers under the age of 10, but two words I hear a lot of are "Oha!" and "Hä?"  These belong to the great class of words known as interjections.  Basically, if you're in the habit of talking with your mouth full, you will find the interjection much more useful than the phrase or sentence.

To clarify these German examples: "Oha!" is kind of like a cross between "Uh oh!" and "ah ha!" People who have already read their way through the collected works of Dick and Jane might be more inclined to say something like "Really?" or,  for the less erudite, "Oh, shit!"  (Although, of course, in German, as pretty much everyone knows thanks to either Lady Gaga or some weird kid from middle school who was way too into World War II history, a more direct translation would be "Scheiße.")

Gaga-fandom aside, "Scheiße" is another word the under-10 set use very freely without ever once raising the eyebrows of caretakers and surrounding parents.  That freedom, of course, does not apply when translated back to English, a fact that some Germans have failed to note.  One colleague even uses the word "shitloads" as a direct synonym for "many" in any and all contexts.  That's funny when you're talking about how many chicken wings you ate last night, but less so when you're discussing how many new reading materials need to be ordered for the coming school year.

Of all things lost in translation, swear words are one group that is almost impossible to explain to a non-native speaker.  For one thing, I am constantly surprised by the very liberal use of the f-word on German television.  Seriously, these production companies need to send their editors on a road trip across the elementary school parking lots of North America in a convertible equipped with great speakers and a tapedeck full of uncensored Top 40.  Let's see how comfortable they feel dropping the f-bomb in the after-school programming slot after the rage of the PTA has rained down on them.  On The Voice of Germany, one of the nominally English-speaking judges uses the f-word to ramp up his descriptions of everything from pretty bad to pretty good singing.  And I thought that kind of show was made for family viewing - I mean, if it's not appealing to tweens, who else could possibly be watching?

As for "Hä?", in that uncomplicated world without umlauts that the English language has made a reality, it would probably be spelled more like "Heh?" (Poor Germans - in their comic books, even dastardly witches have to cackle with diacritical markings.)  It basically describes the state of confusion summed up by the expression "huh?", only with European flair.  Try it.  It's pretty fun to say.  Hä? Hä. Huh.

Wirklich? Really?: Window Shutters

One of those images of Germany that really stuck in my mind - pre-German living expeirence, of course - was of those big Alpine houses with A-frame roofs and planters of flowers hanging from every colourfully shuttered window.   It's probably Heidi that did it to me, although if I'd only paid attention, I would have realized it took place in Switzerland.  Post-Germany, that image has been pretty much obliterated.  Only the shutters remain.

Windows in Germany are built differently.  They open two ways - tilted inward from a bottom hinge or swinging inwards like a door.  It all depends on how you turn the handle.  As someone who has broken at least one of these handle mechanisms (with the help of a torrential rainstorm, to be fair), I can say that they are not always particularly sturdy.  The window can come off the bottom hinge, or the handle can become disconnected from whatever ingenious clockwork-type mechanism engages the hinges.  To me they seem finicky.  Opening and closing them properly may be one of those skills you have to have learned as a child.  Whether it's to protect the flimsy windows or to protect the precious Ikea furniture inside from light damage or theft, the Germans have outfitted their windows with heavy duty shutters.

These shutters roll down from the top of the window to completely obfuscate all light going in or out.  They are controlled either by a strap from the inside that you can hoist up or down, or by a button that mechanically lowers and raises them. A less tactful visitor might refer to them as black-out shutters.  A very untactful visitor might ask if their hosts also have a panic room.

The sound of shutters rolling up or rolling down is surprisingly loud.  You can hear the individual plates of the shutter clattering against each other as they settle into place.  To me it always sounds like an admonishment, whether up or down: "Get up! Get up! The sun is out and you should be dressed and presentable to the pedestrians waiting for the U-Bahn outside your window!" or "Shut up! Go to bed!  You are making too much noise and I need to resort to going on lockdown to keep out the sound of your television blaring on about the vacation homes of Justin Bieber and Heidi Klum."

When is a Kleenex not a Kleenex?

I seem to spend a lot of time at the post office.  I don't think this is a particularly German experience; rather, this has everything to do with being a stranger in a strange land.  First of all, I love sending postcards, and as a lifelong Stamp Traveller (Happy Canada Day!), I like to pick out flashy new stamp releases to wow my friends back home.   Post offices do have machines that prints stamps to order depending on how much money you feed them, but  the stamp is always the same stylized graphic of the Reichstag in Berlin and (Achtung!) they do not give change, so I tend to steer clear.  Secondly, German postal workers seem unable to read names that are not of indisputably local origin, and because apartments do not have numbers and everything is delivered based on the name on your mailbox, that means a lot of mail does not reach me without an extra trip to the post office.  With suitable identification, of course.

On my most recent trip to send out some packages, I picked up some scotch tape as well.  The cashier and I did our regular song and dance routine where he tries to convince me not to send a package express because it costs too much and I try to explain the very foreign concepts of deadline, urgent, and ASAP.  Germans are very concerned about saving money, especially, it seems, other people's money.  It's the perfect storm of thriftiness and nosiness.  Anyway, after he had rung up the packages, I put the scotch tape on top of the pile.  And, I said, the Tesa.  At which point he looked at me and said, I see you have learned some of our German words.  As if, of course, every other word out of my mouth was not also German that I have painstakingly learned and practiced in order to make transactions such as this one.  Yes, I smiled, I'm integrating.

For those of you who don't know, Tesa is the ubiquitous brand of scotch tape in Germany.  Let us not forget that Scotch is also a brand name, one that, probably because "transparent adhesive tape" is too unwieldy for everyone except off-brand marketers, has become shorthand for the thing itself in all its generic forms.  Germans have their shorthand too.  When is a Kleenex not a Kleenex?  When you're in Germany, of course.  But here it's not just a tissue.  No, here they have their own brands, and so instead of a hankie you pass a Tempo.

New brand names add a whole new dimension to the foreign experience, and make you sit up and realize how many trademarked titles have slipped into your vocabulary.  For example, bandaid.  Bandage doesn't really mean the same thing, does it?  A paramedic applies a bandage; your mom gives you a bandaid.  Here in Germany, bathroom cabinets are stocked up with Hansaplast (of several kinds, which must be confusing).   Or Whiteout.  When was the last time someone asked you if you were carrying around correction fluid in your pencil case?  (I know, it's been a while since I had a pencil case, too.)  For Germans, the answer would be a matter of Tipp-Ex.

There are also some things that have escaped being linked to a brand name here.  For example, Jello is just Wackelpudding, or wiggly pudding.  Popsicle also passed Germany by - here it's the self-explanatory Eis am Stiel, or ice cream on a stick.  Post-it notes are Haftnotizen.  Saran-Wrap is Haushaltsfolie.

But some things remain the same.  Tupperware is, and always will be, Tupper.  In fact, the Germans love this one so much (and Tupperware parties - but that's another story), that they have not only adopted the brand name as the noun but as a verb.  That means you don't just toss your sandwich in a container, you eintuppern it.  TM, naturally.

Europameisterschaft: Playing (soccer) with Fire

For those of you who are out of earshot of Europe right now and can't hear all the honking cars, we are in the middle of the Euro Cup, known here in Germany as the Europameisterschaft or EM.  For Germans, there is no need to include in the title the details of exactly which "Meisterschaft", or championship, is up for grabs, because when it comes to sports, the answer could only be soccer.  Or, as some prefer to call it, football.  They, of course, mean soccer.

There are several precautions you have to take as a foreigner during Euro Cup fever.  The first one is to pay attention to the colours you are wearing, because all of a sudden everyone is paying particular attention to your fashion choices.  Black pants, red shirt and gold earrings means you are for Germany.  Green backpack, red shorts and white tee means you support Italy.  Red, white, and blue means you could support any one (or all) of the remaining European countries, from Croatia to the Netherlands. Depending on your outfit and the various wins and losses of the day, you will be the victim of honking cars or booing pedestrians at intersections and along sidewalks.

 (Whether it's Germans in particular or Europeans in general, I've discovered that national colours really mean something here.  I mailed a package to Pennsylvania via the increasingly undependable Deutsche Post the other day, and the post office clerk held up a long closing-time line for five minutes as he dug out a pin bearing the state flag of Pennsylvania from the back storage room to prove to me that the glorious flag of the Keystone State and the German postal service share the same colours.  Spooky.  I hope he called the writers for National Treasure III.)

Second rule of thumb: do not attempt to play any sports other than soccer within the designated two week period of Euro Cup competitions.  Carrying a basketball around the city last weekend raised many more eyebrows than almost anything else I could have paraded around with in Germany.  The only other thing I can think of would have landed me in jail.  Anyway, there were honks.  There were stares.  An old man toddling about in a newsboy cap and his Sunday best tried to smack the ball out of my hands as I was walking down the street.  I thought for a moment he might be riffing on this moment in the Germany vs. Netherlands game, made briefly legendary by the internet, where the German coach playfully hit a soccer ball out from under a distracted ball boy's arm.  I quickly came to my senses, however.  Meme would not be in this man's vocabulary.

This opportunity for protest via unpatriotic sport has not been lost on the more anti-social Germans.  I actually saw some of our local punks tossing around a football - yes, that is an American football - outside of my apartment building.  Somewhere in Stuttgart there is an American soldier who will have some serious explaining to do at this week's team practice.  In Europe, American-style footballs do not grow on trees.

Word Up: der Pony

I finally got around to getting my hair cut here in Germany.  This has been difficult to avoid, because I live above a hair salon and have been saying hello to whoever is unlucky enough to have to open the store every morning for the last twelve months or so.  However, I had good reason.  Because, although at home I am used to nodding along as trained professionals advise me that I should lose some length or I need an undercut, I am not yet able to speak hairdresser in German.

However, thankfully, German women's magazines, reinforced by the fact that the best new hot now haircut is a topic of unending interest for their readership, have taught me some of the basic vocabulary. When it comes to learning new languages, there is nothing better than repetition.  Most of it is pretty self-explanatory - inches are translated to centimetres, layers to Schichte, haircut to Haarschnitt.  But, bangs, or a fringe to those of you who dutifully celebrated the Diamond Jubilee last week, are called a Pony.  Of course, we already have a hair-related pony in English - the ponytail.  The Germans have it too, kind of: der Pferdeschwanz, or horse's tail.  This may seem like a harmless difference.  But, when my hairdresser is blabbing on about a schicker Pony and I think he is talking about keeping my hair long enough for a chic ponytail, both of us are going to end up unhappy, because while I am imagining a toller Pfersdeschwanz, he is breaking out the razor to cut some awesome bangs.  Of course, my unhappiness would probably last a lot longer than his.  He would have to endure a night without enough Trinkgeld to buy a (ridiculously expensive German) margarita, but I would be spending months obsessively checking mirrored surfaces, waiting for my hair to grow back out.

Clearly, we all agree that horses have something special going on when it comes to hair.  Whether it's a cute forelock or the long flowing tail, they have a good look. And, to be fair, "bangs" doesn't make much sense as a word to describe hair.  But there has to be a limit - the noble horse can only lend its name to one hairstyle or the other.  German and English will have to duke it out over this one.

image from lesleychou via flickr.com

Lessons learned in Provence

I recently took a week of holiday to enjoy Provence in early spring before the tourists were out and before the weather became seasonable.  We've spent our time pretty solidly in the Germanic-language zones of Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, so crossing the border into France was a treat.  Not to mention that, as Canadians, we spent a good deal of our schooldays memorizing French verb conjugations, and this is the place where, nominally, all that work should have paid off.

We took the new TGV line from Frankfurt to Marseille.  This is the line that boasts a bunch of brand-new TGV-dedicated stations built outside of city centres.  Although this means that you get a wonderful view of the changing French countryside and its mustard fields and quaint castles and rusted car lots, it also means that you get next to no sense of the cities you are nominally passing through (Dijon? Besançon?).  From the TGV station at Avignon, you have to take a shuttlebus to reach the downtown, making it a very airport-like experience.  However, you also get where you are going very, very quickly without leaving the ground, so I am willing to take a little inconvenience with my comfort.  (Having stood along a tiny local platform in Cassis as a TGV barrelled past, an experience that involved gale force winds, lots of horn-tooting, and being frightened to death, I think that reducing human-high-speed-train contact as much as possible is probably a good idea.)

The seats were very comfortable.  The company was a little weird.  Because this is a completely new route of travel from Germany to France, extra precautions were in effect.  Before we crossed the border into Strasbourg, an extremely friendly German police officer came by and handed out brochures in English, German, and French highlighting the dangers of pickpocketing in France.  Friendly - to a point.  When we insisted on taking the lone English brochure, he could not resist questioning us on our origin, place of residence, and our apparent disregard for the German language.  Six pages of photos basically boiled down to a warning to stay alert and stay safe.  Clearly they expected unsuspecting German pensioners to take the new line to France only to be fleeced of their life savings and Hugo Boss leather goods.  Notably, there was no brochure on the way back for the poor Marseillais headed to the hard streets of Frankfurt.

He probably should have handed out a brochure on surviving crowds of youth, as well, because as I see it that's the weirdest endemic French problem of the moment.  How do they do it?  One moment you are standing in a deserted street in a little French town with lavender window boxes and the next second you are in the middle of a crowd of loud French teenagers hanging onto each other - boy, girl, girl, boy - and laughing along to a story about somebody's sister or sister in law or something.  You don't see packs of teens like this in Germany, swarming hungrily, or if you do, nine times out of ten they're actually French schoolkids trucked into Germany for goodness-knows-what kind of cultural exchange.

Other than that, Provence was beautiful.  We saw flocks of bulls and flamingos in the marshy Camargue, biked to villages perchés on rocky cliffs in the Alpilles, and hiked along the fjord-like calanques outside of the coastal town of Cassis. We ate more than our fill of olives and olive products, cheese, local tomatoes, sweet and savoury pastries, and, uh, more olives.  We dipped a toe in Marseille.  And after months and months of typical German service, those famously obnoxious French waiters seemed refreshingly friendly.

Wirklich? Really?: Der Kuchenbehälter, a Cake Carrier

One thing I've learned at my work is that Germans are really into cake.  Besides the requisite 4PM "Kaffee und Kuchen" tradition about which guidebooks wax eloquent (which of course is a culturally distinct eating ritual that bears no resemblance to the English preference for 4 o'clock tea or North American celebration of anytime donut), a general interest in cake making and eating seems to take up a large part of the German female brain.  And along with this fascination with fondant, leaveners, and cake pops come the requisite accessories.  Behold, the cake carrier.

The cake carrier in Germany does not resemble the colourful retro contraption as seen above.  Nor is it's presence limited to the households of people who had a few margaritas at a garden party in 1982 and accidentally bought into a complete set of orange and green Tupperware that included a devilled egg holder.  The cake carrier of today is usually made of clear, unornamented plastic, either in the shape of a log or a circle.  The handle makes it easy to carry, although Germans must be pretty much obliged to be constantly eating cake in order to justify storing one of these things in a tiny German kitchen.

So, the question goes, which came first, the carrier or the cake?

Whatever the answer, cake is important to Germans, as is the ability to renew the cake supply.  Knowing how to bake is taken as a given at my workplace.  It is assumed that I can whip up all delicacies with vaguely Anglo-American origins, from (Philadelphia) cheese cake with graham crust to hot cross buns to (Starbucks) cake pops. For kids, cake appreciation comes complete with quizzes on the comparative qualities of yeast and sour-cream dough.  Don't think that Betty Crocker or time-saving devices have anything to do with this brand of domesticity.  One coworker was showing off a photo of the cake she is baking for her cousin's wedding - using a highly coveted German-language cookbook that she snapped up in an ebay bidding war for the bargain price of 130 Euros.

And well, okay, maybe it's expected that childcare professionals have a Martha Stewart thumb, but I can attest that even the ladies of high finance can spend a Sunday afternoon or two crafting pralines for their coworkers.  I just don't know if I can ever be thankful for breakroom donut holes ever again.

Word Up: Sim Sala Bim

For working magic tricks like pulling rabbits out of hats and European nations out of debt, Germans say "Sim Sala Bim" instead of "Abracadabra".  I'm not about to tread into this etymological rat's nest complete with Olde English references in order to figure out exactly where and why Northern Europeans tend to one and not the other, so let's just agree that Germans do it different.

Word Up: Abk., or Abkürzungen

You cannot escape acronyms and abbreviations in Germany.  Germans love to make up long, long, long words.  Remember Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung?  However, having made up those words, they then, like anyone else, realized that if everyone went around saying those words to each other it would take all day to buy stamps at the post office or drop off some documents at city hall (as opposed to the perfectly acceptable time frame of half a day).  So, they condensed those tongue-twistery words back on themselves into indecipherable acronyms such as AB, AW, and WG, and cute nicknames like Hiwi, Azubi, Bufdi, and Kripo that sound like the cast of a British children's show.

While it's all very well to use AB for Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung or WG for Wohngemeinschaft, you do have to stay on your toes or consult a specially-made dictionary so as not to confuse them with BA, or answering machine, or WC, which means toilets.  I had a very, very confusing week where my boss told me I had to start an AG at my work, which I took to mean an Aktiensgemeinschaft, or business.  What? I thought.  But I had a job, didn't I?  Was this some weird Great Leap Forward plan to save the Euro? Was I expected to start running a scrap metal smelter from my balcony to help pay off Greece's debts? However, it quickly became clear to me (before I started rewatching The Apprentice, thank goodness) that all I had to do was start an Aktivitätsgemeinschaft, a club, as a sign of interest in my workplace. (Now that I think about it, this seems like the kind of team-building program that Mao would have approved of.)  It had also become clear to my boss that my fluency in German wasn't what she had thought it to be.

Worst of all, there is nothing to be done.  You can't guess what the acronym means.  At least with a compound word, you can have two out of three words and pretty much guess at the meaning from the context.  With an acronym you are flying blind.  Something like AW could be any combination of words beginning with A stuck together with words beginning with W.  Or it could be a trick, which it is (ha!), and actually stand for Antwort, or answer, which, by my standards is a perfectly normal length word that doesn't need to be shortened by picking apart the syllables into an acronym.  It's as if you were to behave absolutely ridiculously by taking a word like "number" in English and fooling yourself into believing you were making it more clear and manageable by shortening it to something stupid like "No."  Oops.  Well.  Bad example.

image via scribblesandscratches.wordpress.com

Wirklich? Really?: Cubi-Doo

I hope that Hanna-Barbera is getting some royalties on this one.  Lord knows they could use it after they made the mistake of backing an all-ages-inappropriate family movie and marketing it to Buffy fans.


This is not the lone incidence of Scooby-doo in everyday German.  Gimp - that weird plastic crap used to braid ugly keychains -  is also known here in Germany as Scooby-Doo.  Kids still use it.  Trade it.  Give it to their best friends.  And - so say the Europeans - they had the name first.  See Wikipedia for the whole (rather unlikely) story in which "Scoubidou" is a popular French song from the 1950s, scoubidous are some kind of sock hop version of jelly bracelets, and Ethel and Julius Rothenburg are all to blame.  So who stole what, when, and from whom?  Let me just say that, after hearing three 9 year old boys absent-mindedly sing all the words to (I've Had The)Time of My Life while drawing Star Wars fan pictures, I am no longer surprised to find further evidence that Europe has access to a time warp that taps into memes no one else remembers.  

Word Up: das Budget, or Pardon My French

I am embarrassed to admit that I am addicted to VOX’s Shopping Queen.  It’s the latest addition in the “Das perfekte….” series of reality tv shows on this channel, which are themselves a bastardized version of the latest in demeaning British television. Each week 5 people get together to compete at something like cooking food or shopping and then rate each other on the results.  Five nights of reasonably catty reality tv, and you don't even have to waste your long-term memory in storing contestant names, job histories or sexual orientations from week to week.

Anyway, I discovered Shopping Queen a couple of weeks ago while on sick leave, and I’ve allowed myself to continue this guilty pleasure based on the fact that I’m improving my German while rotting my mind.  So far I know to add “nuh?” at the end of all my sentences is a truly authentic way to sound like an airhead. (Heidi Klum has backed this up on my second favourite German reality tv show, Germany’s Next Topmodel.)  However, the other  major addition to my vocabulary baffled me for at least two weeks of episodes.  How much money they have: what I thought was the BG actually turned out to be a fancy Frenchified way of saying “Budget.”  Think Tar-jay for Germans.

Germans are just as guilty of Francophilia as the British.  But rather than showing their appreciation by buying up France, they are embracing the Frenchification of their language. The original French pronunciation is preserved in words like  “Engagement” and “Chance.” Of course, most of these words have clearly been absorbed into the German language due to the colonizing influence English as an international ingua franca, as opposed to, say, repeat viewings of Alain Resnais movies. 

These word borrowings are totally frustrating to someone who has spent several months attempting to internalize German pronunciations by repeating all of the announcements made on the S-Bahn at extreme personal risk.  Just when you think you've gotten rid of all of the habits built up by a decade of French classes, you wind up having to relearn it all at the "Accessoires" counter in a German department store. 

It's all the more frustrating because the Germans don’t quite pull off their well-intentioned word borrowings.  They sound like Germans, understandably, who are struggling through grade-school French. In the same way, simple English words like "Partner" and "Vintage" fail to make the transition without an extra “w” and a few glottal stops for good measure.  And then there are the in-between words like "Details" - looks like it's English, sounds like it's (sort-of) French - a completely German invention.  When in doubt, stick with an old-fashioned Germanic word like "Einzelheit."  The German grandmothers of the world will thank you.

image via newspoint.cc

Geschmack: Russisch Brot

When I saw these alphabet cookies in the supermarket, I was sure I had found the German answer to animal crackers.  Cute packaging, vaguely educational value, sugar content - check.  Sadly, Russisch Brot are more cracker than cookie and more tasteless than anything else.  Any questions about their mysteriously opaque Russian origins – they’re called “Russian Bread” in German for those of you without Google Translator doing your thinking for you -  are answered with your first taste, because nobody knows how to screw up chocolate like the Russians.   The only reason I can possible think that cocoa has been added (and it's there in the ingredients) is to give the cookies that dark brown edible-side-of-burnt colour, the origin of which has been gratifyingly misidentified by Chowhound snobs waxing nostalgic for Europe.

Speaking of origins, they're murky, and nobody knows who gave them the Russian name.  There are competing versions giving credit to witty Viennese and travelling Dresdners bringing a taste of the motherland to the German speaking world.  The ungrammaticalness of the name (because in German, adjectives always have special endings depending on the case and gender of the noun they describe, which "Russisch" has brazenly forgone) is yet further proof that they were brought to Germany by someone without enough German to pass a citizenship exam.  I can certainly think of a few Katarinas and Natalias who are currently evangelizing this particular brand of German grammar.  However, the cookies that I bought at my local supermarket have been otherwise thoroughly naturalized – no backwards Rs or upside-down Ls here.

Geschmack: Après Ski

A month or so ago, my boyfriend and I made the trek to a Bavarian ski resort in search of snow and après-ski.  Co-workers had been talking about their ski vacations all winter, gloating not so much about the slopes at Zell or Kitzenbühl but about what comes after – schnapps, strobe lights, and moonboots. In other words, the distinctly European pleasure of après ski.

When it comes to skiing, I'm more inclined towards the before activities rather than the after.  To me, the pleasure is the time spent on the runs. Après ski means hustling into the car after the last lift closes in order to beat all the pickups onto the icy hairpin turns that lead down the mountain.  The ski experience in Canada is a little more - shall we say - rustic than your standard ski-in resort here in Europe.  Skiing we have; resorts we lack.

That being said, I've seen my share of glamorous seventies-vintage Vogue editorials of ski bunnies in fairisle sweaters and fur-trimmed loungewear languorously sharing fondue, so I was pretty excited to make it to Oberstdorf – above mentioned Bavarian ski resort – to sample this most Euro of pastimes. Of course, because skiing at a European ski resort is way out of my price range, as are, to be honest, both fairisle sweaters and fondue,  I wasn't there to ski.  It turned out I wasn't even there to take the gondola up to the peak and then hike around on the walking trails like I thought I was, because a ticket to walk cost more than my return train fare to Stuttgart.  I settled for hiking about 100 metres up the mountain in my sneakers along an access road before painfully picking my way down the steep slope in order to work up my après ski appetite.  

To say I was disappointed is an understatement.  The first signs of après ski culture were not auspicious.  We saw a self-identified hot spot with laminated menus hanging half off its windows where the red packing tape used to stick them up had become unglued.  We saw a heated patio with garage-like rolling doors blaring pop music, totally empty.  Our final resting place was little more fulfilling:  a white vinyl tent erected above some jerry-rigged wooden benches playing Top 40 to clients sipping pastel coloured drinks and well representing faux fur manufacturers from Chengdou to Bratislava.  There was a disco ball.

I could only imagine the turn the scene would take as twilight actually fell – as I said, I’m an early-to-bed kind of girl.  It wouldn’t be pretty, I was sure.  There were no stone fireplaces or  smooth jazz or laughing turtlenecked co-eds.  The atmosphere was more basement bar than mountaintop chalet.  We settled for some cake and took the early train home in the friendly company of an East German train conductor, probably the last German to still be happy to meet people who are happy to speak only English.

Come Monday, however, the colleagues were not impressed by our après ski quest.  Cakes, one of them said dismissively.  This is not après ski.  But we kept our winter jackets on, I said, while we ate our cake.  They gave me that one.

Geschmack: Haribo Bronchiol Cough Drops

What with the recent talk about doctor's notes, you must know that I am sick here in Germany.  And, because I actually have a job, that means I had to go to a doctor and get an official note to excuse me from work.  I was given a week to recuperate, which seemed pretty generous to me, but the doctor clearly knows a thing or to about the lifespan of German viruses, because I needed it.

As a result, I have been trying many types of German cold medication - most of it herbal in nature, because here every request for medication goes through the pharmacist, and pharmacists appear to be very unwilling to give out anything that may actually have a pain-relieving effect to foreigners.  It probably doesn't help that I invariably turn up at the pharmacy with a long list of unfamiliar drug names that the pharmacist then has to look up letter by letter on her little computer, all of which always turn out to be banned or otherwise controlled here in Germany.  So I walk away with supplements, menthol rubs, and saline nasal sprays instead of anti-histamines, cough suppressants, or painkillers.  Forget non-drowsy, I dearly love anything with enough kick to make it unsafe for me to operate heavy machinery.  

To be honest, though, it probably took me longer than usual to recuperate from the flu simply because I didn't have the stimulating effects of these carefully controlled and possibly addictive drug components.  I was so cranky about not getting Tylenol Cold when and where I wanted, that maybe I am just the drug-dependent North American the pharmacist suspects I am after all.

I was wondering how it could be that people have to take one or two weeks off for colds and flus here.  Well, here is the why: they don't have Dayquil to get them up and running in two days, and they're happy to let someone have the time off because then nobody's breathing germs all over the office and the doctor and pharmacist have conspired to guarantee that the missing coworker is probably having a pretty horrible time at home with a box of kleenex and a hot water bottle.  And, in two weeks, you're either completely cured or dead.

But, witness, please, the fun part of being sick in German: Haribo Bronchiol cough drops.  They're gummy! They're made with real Japanese mint oil!  And they're Haribo!  This one might not go down so well in North America - after all, mixing candy and medicine can lead to all types of unadvisable misconceptions.

image via amazon.com

Word Up: der Schneebesen and die Gluhbirne

A lot of German words are really ugly.  Take something like, oh, Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung - that's a doctor's note for all of you Anglos - or Telefonanrufbeantworter - at least tell me you guessed that had something to do with an answering machine.  These are the type of words, ominously multisyllabic and menacingly glotal, that do at least a third of the work of carving out Germans as the bad guys in WWII blockbusters.  (Those other thirds are owed to John Williams and, uh, history.)

But the German language does have a softer, gentler side.  Maybe not to hear it over the credits in Inglourious Basterds, but, when sit down and think about what some of those compound words break down to literally, you start to realize the Germans are really all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

Take das Schneebesen, for example, known in English as a whisk.  If you translate it literally from German, a Schneebesen is a "snow broom."  Isn't that the cutest thing?  Can't you imagine whipping up a big pillowy bowl of egg whites with your snow broom?  Or rather, can't you imagine little German garden gnomes whipping up a big pillow of egg whites with their snow brooms?  Maybe with the Smurfs in tow?

Or, another example on what I think of the fairytale club of German vocabulary: die Gluhbirne.  This is a lightbulb, only in German, it's a "glow-pear."   Not to be confused with the Hasbro children's toy Glo-worm, although let me warn you that once you start using the Glo-friends as a mnemonic device, it is almost impossible to erase the association.  Come to think of it, "lightbulb" is kind of sweet too - like a magical tulip or something, an idea that seems more Dutch than English, actually, given they had made the error of actually believing in magical tulips in the past.

But don't bother trying to explore these sweet Brothers-Grimm-isms with German speakers.  They will stare at you blankly, and then ask you once again why you can say "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Easter" but not vice versa.  Leave it to the Germans to find the truly important questions.

image via foundshit.com

Wirklich? Really?: Smells like New Zealand

The snow has recently turned to rain here in Stuttgart, which means streetcars are running on time, the ponds are thawing, and the shops are full of wet people who smell like laundry detergent.

I'm not saying that this is a German-only thing.  I'm sure that to Europeans travelling to rainy Vancouver, Canadians reek of Downy.  It's just that European laundry detergent smells different.  Whether you pick ocean spray or fresh breeze, it's heavy, musty, earthy, and it permeates all fabrics.  Lean in to speak to a waiter or inch too close to the person next to you in line, and you get a deep whiff of what smells like men's cologne of the cheapest variety.

Why does this smell good to a German?  Let's answer this by looking at what Germans think another country smells like - New Zealand.  Not just Febreze, but also Mr. Clean are now available in New Zealand-scented products.  Actually, the description of this scent on the Febreze website reads like a wine review: white fruits, red fruits, green notes.  This scent, according to the website, brings the rainforest to you.  Herein lies the problem.

Stuttgart has a really good zoo, the Wilhelma, which was originally a pleasure garden for the prince of the region, stocked with animals from across the Württembergish empire - which means lots of chickens - and beyond, which means polar bears and parrots and everything in between.  One of the most interesting parts is the greenhouses, which includes tropical crops like cacao, coffee, cinnamon, and jojoba.  It's amazing to see these staples of my pantry in their raw state in something like their exotic home environment.  It's not so amazing to be stuck in the suffocating damp heat of a rainforest for more than ten minutes.  It's a scent experience I would describe as overwhelming rather than refreshing.  Overwhelming is also the word I would use to describe the smell of German cleaning products.

Mystery solved.  At least partially; I also think that the fact that many Germans use high-efficiency washing machines means that their detergent doesn't get rinsed out well enough, making the scent even stronger than intended by whoever's testing this stuff on monkeys somewhere.  My tiny washing machine uses such little water that it takes over two hours to wash an armful of clothing, and you can be sure that if I dumped the recommended amount of detergent in with my clothes, I would smell like a rainforest as well.  In fact, if I had been using the recommended amount for the last year, I would probably be used to it by now.  I might even like it.

Wirklich? Really?: Quicky Car

Three flavours of ice cream, a thousand possible punchlines.

Geschmack: das Fasnetsküchle

Another German holiday, another addictive baked good.  The Fasnetsküchle is the official pastry of Mardi Gras in South Germany, which is called Fasnet in Swabian dialect or Fastnacht if you're a consonant-conscious member of the language police.  Fasting is part of the post-Mardi Gras tradition (which, for those of you who didn't go to Catholic school, is the pleasure-denying month of Lent), so by way of preparation in the days before Lent, you are free to stuff yourself with as many Fastnetsküchle as possible.

And stuff yourself you will.  The Fasnetsküchle itself is a rectangular-shaped Dutchie donut that would melt the heart of any Krispy Kreme lover.  Covered with granulated sugar, it is soft, light, and delicious.  Due to its ingenious no-hole design, one 'küchle is probably equivalent to at least two normal donuts.  Leading up to Fasnet, which is only one week away, they are being sold in local bakeries as three for less than 2 Euros.  I am seriously overdue for some fasting.

In fact, I'm pretty excited for this whole Fasnet thing, which is a week-long affair that spreads from Schmotziger Donnerstag to Ash Wednesday.  Forget Fat Tuesday, I'm looking forward to Fat Thursday.  I thought that this Schmotziger Donnerstag had something to do with spring cleaning, as schmutzig means dirty, but apparently that one little vowel makes all the difference and "schmotz" has something to do with baking and fat.  It's a Swabian thing.

According to the banner that has been hanging over the pedestrian zone in Bad Cannstatt here in Stuttgart for the last three weeks, Schmotziger Donnerstag is a mess of parades, charades, races, masks and bizarre medieval traditions that involve cabbages and nightgowns.  Bring on the mummery.

image via cafe-baecker-meyer.de

Geschmack: der Kochbeutelreis

Cooking rice in Germany takes some trial and error.  At first, at the supermarket, dictionary in hand, everything seems normal.  Langkornreis, check.  Milchreis - a little weird, but alright.  Sure, it's not basmati rice, and the serving size seems to indicate that Germans eat rice maximum once per month, but the pictures on the boxes seem pretty normal, and how wrong can you go with rice? But, once you've passed the cash register and hauled it all home, you may find yourself with an open box and some bewildering contents.  In most cases, four little plastic perforated baggies, with the rice neatly encased inside them.  This, my friends, is Kochbeutelreis.

Never mind that the serving size within these baggies seems to indicate that Germans use Amnesty International's recommendations for starving children to calculate the size of rice dishes, these cooking bags are strange.  When I opened my first box of rice packed with Kochbeutel, or cooking baggies, I, naturally, googled to see if I could cook the rice normally, without the cumbersome bag.  Germans, it seems, have the opposite question, because the answers I found on the internet were to the honest question, is it possible to cook rice without a Kochbeutel? At last, another cultural paradigm shift.

Of course, the answer is yes.  Inside the perforated bag is rice, plain and simple.  But, why do Germans do this?  Why cook your rice inside plastic that you then have to cut your food out of in order to serve?  What is the benefit to Kochbeutelreis?  Apparently, the rice burns less often, because you can cook it in a large pot of water rather than matching the water level to the exact amount of rice that you are cooking, a calculation that, if you're distracted by kitchen cleanup or the latest Tatort, leads so often to disaster.  Secondly, the Kochbeutel is there all the better to trap the wonderful vitamins in rice inside the mesh and ensure they are not thrown out with the bathwater.  Of course, if you are cooking rice the normal way, there is no bathwater to speak of, as it is sucked into the rice anyway.  I'm sure that, if the Germans insist on doing it, there must be better reasons.

To add to the riddle, be aware that while not all rice is Kochbeutelreis, any rice can be packaged neatly in Kochbeutel.  It's not always clear what you're getting, either.  A wrong turn, of course, is not the end of the world.  All you have to do is snip the rice out of the little baggies, or try your hand at rice cookery, German style.