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.